A Better Earth
**************

17 October 2010
Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 by Robert J. Chassell, A
Better Earth is made available under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Thank You
*********

Pronunciation
=============

D and G are hard, as in 'doll' and 'gulf.'  J is soft, without a D
sound.  It is a French 'J', as in 'Jean.'

AE is a long 'A', as in 'name.'  In English, the name 'Djaeds' is
spelled 'Djades', where a vowel is made long by following it by a
consonant and a silent 'e.'  'Gammae', which ends in AE, is pronounced
'Ghah-may.'

Chapter 1
*********

"A bribe, a simple bribe.  An extra-legal payment for an extra-legal
action."  He muttered to himself.  That is what Vallen wanted.
Suddenly, he remembered he had spoken outloud and had an escort.  The
young man was sitting with him in the limosine but way to his left and
seemed to be asleep.  In any case, Vallen had been nearly silent.

He thought about receiving a bribe, not speaking, then a quarry
distracted him.

Vallen Dundel was traveling to a subcontractor's factory for an
inspection.  He was in a country distant from his own and curious.  He
saw the quarry in the middle of a field.

The land looked flat.  The quarry was a big hole in the ground.  Its
existence told him that rock lay below the dirt rather than sand or
gravel and that the dirt was thin enough.

Strong men, he saw, cut large blocks with diamond toothed saws.
Special cranes lifted the blocks; they were too heavy for people.  No
one cut small blocks with a hammer and chisel.

The quarry was efficient.  It employed a technology quite different
from that of a thousand or two thousand years before -- even though
the old methods had provided stone for beautiful buildings which had
lasted.

Vallen mused.  By now, the modern techniques for stone cutting were
generations old.  The adaptation took place long ago.

But the first time, Vallen knew, the new techniques meant the same
number of men could cut more blocks.

For inland cities, transportation was the big cost.  Without many
stone companies in the market, the people who headed them could get
together, restrict production, and keep prices up.  No one powerful
would have any reason to cut more blocks.

Chapter 2
*********

Filgard Meldon did not plan to become a revolutionary; he tried to
raise money from venture capitalists.

As he packed, Fairta leaned against a door frame in the house they
lived, on what had once been a farm.

It was just a day trip, but he figured that something might happen.
Fairta was middle aged, not too tall, not matronly.  She and Filgard
had been married for more than two decades.

Fairta said to Filgard, "I have a notion for you to think about as you
travel."  Filgard grumbled a bit, "I am going to be looking out the
window."  "Yes," Fairta said, "but some of the time, you will be
waiting and have already looked at everything.  Then you can think."
Filgard nodded.  He also knew she would tell him.  She prepared
everything for him, quite reasonably thinking he was impractical.  It
no longer bothered her.  Most of the time, she led her own life as a
violinist.

"Think about the four Galenic temperaments.  I don't have any evidence
-- you might find it -- but I do think they fit.

"My temperament, that of making beauty, being optimistic, preferring
the here and now, is what Galen called 'Sanguine.'  His theory of
humors was wrong; but that is neither here nor there.  I am concerned
about the descriptions his temperaments suggest.

"That first pattern is not practical for a complex society.  We don't
think of leaders as special."  She grinned.  "We cause lots of
trouble."

Then she went on.  "Temperaments are about preference.  My preference
is Sanguine.  That does not mean I cannot see other patterns.  Also,
of course, there are some people who do well in many different ways.
Older people gain skills, too.

"In any case, for a society, a more practical and extensible pattern
is the second, the Melancholic.  People with that preference work hard
and have much common sense.  They are conventional.

"Centuries before Galen, Plato and Aristotle talked about
temperaments.  Aristotle referred to the Melancholic as Proprietary,
as people who gain pleasure by acquiring material assets.  Plato, for
all his idealism, looked at what people did.  He called these people
Guardians.  They guarded the city.  He said they also are endowed with
common sense, work hard, and are very necessary for survival.  All is
true.

"If you enjoy moral virtue, if you have what might be considered an
intuitive sensibility, then according to Galen, you are Choleric.
Aristotle called such a person Ethical, since he or she seeks virtue.
That is where these people's pleasure comes.  Plato called them
Idealists.

"Galen called the fourth type Phlegmatic.  They are supposedly calm;
at least, they try to appear calm to others.  They can learn a great
deal easily; it is not necessarily practical immediately.

Fairta stopped and laughed.  "Plato would have called you a Rational,
because of your reasoning sensibility.

"Some modern people say that there are more than four types, but that
those are the biggest.  They say that temperaments are expressions of
beneficial behaviors.  If taken too far, those behaviors become
dangerous illnesses.  Thus, people who are good diplomats in a
tactical sense, make beautiful things, the optimists, the Sanguine as
Galen called them -- if their beneficial character goes too far, it
becomes mania, a disease.

She grinned.  Filgard was not wearing his tie, even though he had it
hanging out.

"Don't forget your tie ..." she said.  "Also, you don't need to pack a
suitcase; it is only a day trip."

"What if something happens?"  Filgard asked.

"There are no canals, ponds, or lakes where you are going; besides, if
you did fall into one, your hosts would laugh and help you.  You are
worried and trying to be too much of a perfectionist.  All you need to
carry is a briefcase with printed copies of your abstract and of the
proposed contract."

"No one needs those; we can exchange email."

"Yes," said Fairta, "anyone can be practical; that is not the purpose
of this trip.  It is symbolic; carrying a briefcase is like your suit.

"And don't forget to wear your tie."



                                 ---


The building possessed only a single storey.  It was behind barriers,
safe from a car or truck attack.  Most of the employees, those who had
to be there physically, came down a light rail system that had been
built in the far right hand lane of a previously wide road.  From the
airport, it looked like the right hand lane.  Going the other way, it
would be the left hand lane.  The company's name, ADVANCEMENT INC.,
stood on the barrier wall.  It was small, discreet, and meaningless.

Unless you were invited, you would not know that it was the home of a
significant venture capital operation.

Filgard was glad the company had paid for his flight.  Not only had
flying become expensive since the Disaster, much more expensive than
it used to be, but he felt pleased they were paying for him now.  He
was no longer a supplicant.  They wanted to smell him, not merely see
him on a high resolution audio/video link.

He was happy about the limousine they provided, too.  He looked out
its window.  The grass on the side of the road looked just like his at
home.  There were more deciduous trees here, though.  He decided that
looking out the window of the limousine was no different than looking
at a very high resolution audio/video link, except the image went all
around.  He stared out one window, but they were others.  The inside
smelled of leather.  Filgard decided that was probably artificial.
Still, he did not normally sit on leather and enjoy a leather smell.
He liked the service.

Filgard did not have to walk from the rail station through the hot,
humid air to the barrier, but only through the tunnel from the barrier
to the building.  The air in the tunnel was not much cooler than the
air outside, but it was considerably dryer.  Filgard wondered
momentarily what low-energy technology was used to remove water from
the air.

He moved comfortably and loosely -- it was like being in an old time
city, he thought, not an old time suburb in which you drove
everywhere.  He walked; he enjoyed walking.  It served as exercise.
And he enjoyed dry heat.

Old time cities, those with sky scrapers, were dangerous.  That is
what he thought.  He knew that statistically, most were quite safe.
Still, he was fearful.  Someone might attack.  Even though the new
suburbs were much more expensive, being less dense and less energy
efficient, they were perceived as safer.  He perceived them as safer.
You could keep cars and trucks away from buildings.  Each commercial
building had its own security force and back-up generator.  It stored
extra fuel, water, and food.  It was resilient.

Of course, cities worked well for most people.  They were dense and
energy efficient and no longer contained high value targets.  A
belief-based non-state organization could raise money and organize
suicide soldiers for an attack, but the payoff had dropped.  Few
attacked.

The tunnel was not gloomy at all; it was more like a hall in a large
building.  It felt wide and safe.  Natural light came through many
windows.  Although ceiling strips could provide light, they were off.
Filgard looked closely.  As he hoped, the windows were triple paned
with a vacuum between them.  Little heat crept in or out, except for
radiation.  The tunnel fit energy standards for new construction.

It enjoyed rather good wall paper, too, with repetitive glide and
transfer elements.

Filgard came from a university that was close by a town of 250,000
people.  Filgard thought of the town as a city.  It was large enough
for him, but not large enough to become a target.  The buildings were
older than this suburb.  His house was older.  All had been
retrofitted for energy conservation.

In the past, the university had done nothing notable, except to win
sports' tournaments, football, Filgard thought, and maybe other
sports, too.  It used the victories to raise money from alumni.  A
fair bit of the money went back to sports -- Filgard thought of
competitive sports as an irrelevancy to a university, a way to raise
money, as it were, a tax on education.  But some of the money came to
Filgard.

Leaving the tunnel, Filgard came into a large reception hall, larger
than any at his university, except for the one built a generation
before in the business school.  A young man met him.

"Doctor Meldon, please come with me," he said.  As they walked down a
short hall, the young man introduced himself.  "I am George Trumman.
I am your contact here."

During the walk, George Trumman made small talk.

"Filgard D. Meldon, hello," Trumman said.  "I do not confuse you with
the other Filgard Meldon.  He is a convenience store owner.  When
looking into your background, one of our researchers discovered him
first.  Not a Professor of Engineering!  I wonder what the man thought
we were thinking.  It took a moment for him to realize that even
though you have an unusual name, there can be two people with the same
name in the same city.  At least, you have different middle initials!"

Like Filgard himself, Trumman was wearing a suit and tie.  Filgard
thought of that as a uniform telling people who was higher class and
who not, at least in his culture.  He figured Trumman was better at
dressing than he since Trumman did it more often and was more
concerned.

Trumman noticed Filgard's momentary lack of attention but said
nothing.  'Engineers are all alike,' he thought.

He led Filgard into an office twice the size of Filgard's at the
university.  Filgard did not comment on that, but finished the
conversation, a conversation that Trumman had almost forgot.  "Filgard
B. Meldon, the convenience store owner, turns out to be a distant
relative.  I had not known about him.  When it became possible, I did
searches for Filgard D. Meldon or Filgard David Meldon.  That search
always brought up me and only me.

"The Filgard comes from the name of a common ancestor several hundred
years ago.  We are sometimes confused, although the truth is, mostly
not.  Or people do not tell me.  I suspect there are more cases like
your researcher, momentarily confused, then understanding.  Meldon
itself is a common enough name, but not Filgard Meldon.  Well," he
grinned, "I find it fascinating that the only two Filgard Meldons in
the whole world live in the same city."

There was no one else in the office they came to.  Filgard began to
worry.  Trumman did not take long.  He said, "Your work is very good.
Even though your light waves are hundreds of times larger than
molecules, it is clever how you are able to determine the molecules'
exact locations, as well as their types.  We would like to keep an eye
on the project."

Filgard did not say anything; he simply stared.

Trumman shook his head minutely and said, "We cannot fund your
project.  But it is very good."

Filgard still did not say anything.  Trumman, as if he expected this,
said, "You not only have 'proof of concept', you have a working
device.  But we cannot sell it.  We would have to spend a fortune to
design the liquid helium coolers, the lasers, and the recording
elements for everyday use."

He went on.  "You might think, well, we can recoup high private
development costs with a high per unit price.  But we cannot.  That is
a problem in a globalized world."

Trumman had a decanter on his desk.  He poured a fair amount into a
glass and handed it to Filgard who took it without thinking -- and
took a big swig of what he realized was very good Scotch whiskey.
Trumman curved his lips into a tiny smile.  He went on.  Filgard still
had not said anything.

"As soon as we produce one saleable unit, someone, somewhere -- very
likely in one of our factories -- will produce identical copies
without the high initial cost we paid."

He helped Filgard into a chair and sat down himself.

"That happened with the first CDs and DVDs: people in factories that
manufactured them simply bribed a few people, ran extra shifts to
stamp out copies identical to the originals, and sold them at whatever
the market would bear.  As for prevention, the main producers said the
action was as dangerous as murder on the high seas -- they called it
piracy -- but they mostly focused on the small and irrelevant.  They
avoided big action.  They did not prevent these actions.  I think they
were bribed.  After all, you can get many people to do just about
anything for what comes to a relatively small amount if you are
planning on a large return.  And bribing people to let a foreign
factory run an extra shift?  That does not cost much at all.

"It is all a matter of price discrimination: charge more to people who
can afford to pay more, less to people who cannot.  But we cannot
distinguish units of your recorder from one another, not the way an
airline can distinguish seat sales by time.  Well, no one can tell
which CDs and DVDs made by the same factory are pirated or not.  It is
even more a problem now.  We cannot sell one unit more cheaply than
the rest.

"So, we can't fund your project.  We here live in a country with laws
that are obeyed, more or less.  If we were only to manufacture and
sell domestically, like a steel mill or car firm a century ago, we
could fund it.  But we manufacture and sell all over the place.
Everyone does.  And no one will bribe me or the owners of this
company."  For a moment, he looked wistful, as if he wanted to be
bribed.

"But there is hope."  Trumman took a resolute stance.  "Even without
high resolution manufacturing, without nano-assemblers, existing
droplet sprayers can reproduce many MPLs, many metal-plastic-lubricant
designs.  They can manufacture parts for a washing machine.  I don't
know about washing machines, they are simple relatively speaking, but
your recorder means that complex mechanical devices can be
manufactured much cheaper.

"I suggest you use the recorder you have built at the university.  We
can suggest what to look at, pay for what gets destroyed, and sell the
results.  You can give some of the proceeds to the university, some to
us, and keep the rest.  That way, you can fund more work.

"As I said, your recorder is neat."

Filgard found that the whiskey made him a little woozy and
considerably less concerned than he would have been.  They were not
offering him full funding, but they were offering a little.  He would
take it.

So Filgard asked simply, "What are you suggesting?"

Trumman was ready, although he seemed a bit startled at how quickly
Filgard recovered.  "I am sending a file to your wearable," he said.
"We can do that in here without any concern for security, although we
have encrypted it like everything else we have sent you.  Mostly we
are suggesting tools to make tools."

He stopped for a moment.  Filgard noted that the file had finished
downloading.  It was short.

Trumman went on.  "These devices are intrinsically expensive.  Even
when the designs are known, as they normally are, the tools are
difficult and complex to build.  On a world-wide basis, few of each
type are needed.  That means few are sold.  So a company has no
motivation to manufacture and sell them at a lower price.  We will pay
for each tool."

Filgard looked at the prices on the file and realized that his project
could not afford even one.  And it would be destroyed in the process
of recording it.  Filgard could not think of any way to get around
that.  After localizing the position of each molecule or atom,
determining its type, and conveying that information to a computer
file, a cutter had to scrape away the very thin, measured layer.  That
destroyed the original.  Then the sensing could continue.

He did not remember anything else that Trumman said.  There was
nothing meaningful in it.  Somehow, he drank more.  A little later, he
ate a very good lunch that focused on a portion of salmon with an
excellent mustard sauce.  Salmon are carnivorous.  They had become
expensive, too.  Normally, Filgard hardly ate any.  He did not object
to the fish at lunch.  In a sense, it was just as if the company had
funded him.  He left that afternoon at the time planned before and
flew back home.

He liked the flight's service and its speed.  He was in a higher
category than his irregular flights before.  'If only I could do this
on all travels,' he thought.  'But you have to be rich or have rich
sponsors.'  The new plan made it much less likely that he would ever
become rich.  Still, he consoled himself.  'The new plan is not an
ending.  It is not an ending of my day-to-day reality.'  He stopped
thinking for a moment.  He did not want to think his next thoughts,
but they were true.  He could imagine that ahead of time.  'It is an
ending to my dreams.'

Coming up to his house, his wife, Fairta, studied him shrewdly.  She
understood immediately.  Meanwhile, Filgard looked at his windows.
Like those around the tunnel, he could see through them clearly.  But
the panes were fairly small.  They were doubles, with a vacuum between
glass.  They were small so the two sides would not be crushed together
by atmospheric pressure.  Obviously, a glass company could put gas
between the two panes; that would counter the pressure.  The design
would help, since a trapped gas does not convect much.  But a vacuum
was better.  In his house, more heat was lost through the frames than
through the glass itself.  The frames were insulated, but they had to
be narrow.  Even with insulation, they conducted.

The university had windows that were bigger and originally were
considerably better.  The new ones -- now he realized that 'new' meant
two decades old; he had grown older, too, quite unexpectedly; he
laughed at himself; he still felt young -- the 'new' windows had three
panes of glass with aerogel columns as spacers between the outer and
central panes.  The outer panes were both on the inside and outside of
the buildings.  The spacers kept the pressure of the air on the outer
panes from collapsing against the central.  Initially, the aerogels
were transparent and you could hardly tell they were there.  But now
you could see them.  The university windows had become uglier than
his.

His wife had not been at all certain what would come of the trip.  She
did not have his optimism.  So when she saw him as gloomy but not
excessively depressed, she understood.  His face, as usual, told her
more than he realized.

Filgard told her that the venture capitalists would not buy into
company development, but that they would fund operations with the
current machine.  He repeated what Trumman had said about the world
being mostly extra-legal.  "That means," he said, "you cannot make a
profit from something that will be manufactured world-wide."  At that,
Fairta grumbled and said, in a voice that told him he should not take
her too seriously, "What you are saying is that I will still have to
pay attention to money when I buy shoes."  He laughed.

Fairta said she did not have to go out that evening -- she was a
violinist in the university orchestra -- and had prepared a meal.  It
had lamb and chicken as two kinds of meat and squash, potatoes, onions
and beans as vegetables -- it was almost a holiday meal; Filgard
thought of it as a holiday meal.  Fairta had also purchased an
excellent, and expensive, bottle of wine.  "I expected you to be
either exultant or despairing," she said.  "I did not expect you to be
in the middle.  But we are stuck with this wine, unless, of course,
you want a cheap bottle.  We have that."

"No, no," he said.  "The wine goes with the meal.  Let's splurge."

Chapter 3
*********

First, Vallen went to wash his hands.  He found one of the younger men
washing beside him.  Vallen recognized the man and said hello.  Vallen
was slightly bemused to realize that the other was so low on the totem
pole, they had never been introduced.  Vallen did not know his name.
The young man was not wearing a tie.  His shirt was open at the neck.
Vallen did not know whether that was a generic instance of younger
people attacking older or whether it was a peculiarity of the local
culture, of saying, 'we are not you.'  Vallen suspected the latter.
He also noticed that the cloth in the shirt was carefully strengthened
so that its open neck looked well.  That cost.  Vallen liked the
effect.  He took off his tie occasionally; he would make sure the
shirts made for him had the same strengthening.  As he left the wash
room, the young man put on a jacket.  His rebellion did not go too
far.

As he was leaving, he said, "You know," -- Vallen decided the young
man spoke with the same accent as that of major movies -- "You know,"
said the young man, "we could make more profit if we produced more and
sold the extra production at a lower price.  We would just have to
make sure we did not lower all our prices."

"Price discrimination," said Vallen.  The young man had halted half
way out the door.  "But how do we do it?  We do not have regional
markets, like the first DVDs.  We cannot discriminate by time, like
airlines."  "Well," said the young man, "we can do the same as the
first DVD sellers: we cannot copy their governmentally enforced
regional markets, although they only concerned themselves with big
operations; we don't have that kind of big operation; but we can
encourage an extra-legal market.  That is where the DVD companies
sold."

Vallen nodded.  He understood what was going to be offered.  Indeed,
he expected some sort of beginning like this.  At the same time, he
thought of price discrimination as good.  Good for him, good for the
company, good for everyone, except for losers.

It was practical.  Few people in extra-legal markets were willing to
transfer as much of their resources to his company as those in legal
markets.  So, extra-legal people should transfer less.

Vallen was confident that the prices of second shift products would be
set to maximize profits.  He would benefit from higher sales.  Another
shift would require more workers.  They would benefit, too.  Only
disorganized people who paid more would get hurt.  And the unpriced
future would pay -- pollution is a tax on the future.  In places like
this, Vallen thought, it is a tax on the present, too.  He was glad he
did not live here.  The rich could afford to pay more and those around
here couldn't.  Or else those with connections spent their time in
buildings with decently filtered air, like this one.

Vallen nodded again.  "Intelligent price discrimination is vital for a
modern business.  There are increasing returns to scale in the
production of just about everything.  Your produce more, you make
more.  Only through price discrimination can we pay for initial high
costs, including patents and copyrights."  The young man agreed.  He
nodded vigorously.  "Yes," he said, "yes."

The young man came out of the bathroom cheerful.  Sometime later,
after the young man talked briefly with a more senior man, a man who
wore both a tie and jacket, that man took Vallen aside.  "The problem
with price discrimination," he said, "is that we cannot make it
public.  Everyone wants to buy as cheaply as possible."  "It is also
illegal," said Vallen.  "That, too," said the old man dismissively.
"If we do engage in price discrimination, you will have to be
recompensed."  The man's language was flawless, Vallen noted.  'Price
discrimination' and 'recompense' were long words that just flew off
his tongue.

Vallen quoted Adam Smith,

     _It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or
     the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
     their own interest._

The senior man smiled.  They had a deal.

It never occurred to Vallen to repeat a different quotation from Adam
Smith; he never thought it relevant; it never came to mind:

     _People of the same trade seldom meet together ..., but the
     conversation ends in ... some contrivance to raise prices._

Part of the reason was that Vallen did not think of what he was doing
as raising prices.  On the contrary, he felt he was lowering prices to
people who could not afford more.  He never considered that over all,
he and his company were helping to keep prices higher than they would
be in a competitive, free market.  They did not sell meat, ale, or
bread like the people in the Adam Smith quote.  It did not occur to
him that at the time Adam Smith wrote, neither a butcher, a brewer,
nor a baker enjoyed increasing returns to scale; on the contrary, as
more animals were killed, as more grain was grown for brewing or
baking, costs rose.

Vallen ran a division which manufactured and sold specialized car
parts.  All in all, he figured, there was not much risk in permitting
a factory to produce more, but there was some; he would have to be
compensated.

He would have to make sure nothing ill-written passed him by.  He
would have to make sure that tax people and noisy investors expected
the numbers he provided.  It would take work.

It would not do him any good to permit legal prices to fall.  That
might happen if more people learned of this extra-legal development.
At home, only a few managed to get away with paying low prices.
Mainly, they claimed that the products 'fell off a truck' or that they
'bought them wholesale.'  Low prices were not widely published.

And of course, agents, especially those employed by competitors and by
the government, knew that at home this kind of price discrimination
was illegal.  It was not simply extra-legal.  If it were proved that
he was involved, he could go to jail for conspiracy.

He would have to be compensated a fair amount.  Well, they could
afford it.

The goose was good.

Chapter 4
*********

The morning after coming back from the venture capital company,
ADVANCEMENT INC., Filgard went into the university.  He told people
what had happened.  He tried to make positive remarks, but everyone
could see he was disappointed.  Still, everyone said he did well,
which Filgard thought was simple politeness.  Moreover, they acted as
if he had done well.  He wondered whether anyone besides himself had
hoped.

Later that day, he had to go to a faculty-wide meeting.  At first, he
thought to himself that it would prevent him from working, but then he
saw he would get nothing done anyhow, not that day, so the meeting did
not matter.

As far as Filgard remembered, such meetings were rare.  Rather than be
useful, they were designed to impress on the faculty the plans of the
administration.  Since administration plans did not change very often,
and memos served as ritualistic reminders, there were few meetings.
The announcements were routine.  He expected to be bored and was
surprised when the meeting became exciting.

Among other items, the president of the university spoke of continuing
the contract to EFFICIENT WINDOWS INC.  She spoke as if the decision
to continue was routine.  Doubtless, she thought it was.  But one of
the physicists spoke up.  "Why should we do that?"  he asked.  "They
failed before; what makes you think they have changed?"

Clearly surprised, the president asked, "What do you mean, the windows
failed?"  The physicist responded, "The aerogel columns on the windows
we got from them became visible.  Yet they have never said or done
anything about it; nor have we."

The president glanced at the windows.  There were faint, blue squares
visible in them.

"But we installed those windows a long time ago," she said.  "Yes,"
responded the physicist, "eighteen years ago.  And after seven years,
the aerogel inserts appeared.  The aerogel could not handle the
relatively small amount of ultra-violet that got through the glass.
And neither you nor they have said or done anything, even though they
and the university administration said that the windows would remain
transparent.  They conduct more heat than they did, too."

"The decision was before my tenure," said the president.  "Yes," said
the physicist.  "It looks as if your predecessor or some other senior
administration officials were bribed not to say anything."  The
president hid her surprise at this comment.  Why would anyone bother
with windows?  She thought the fellow was seriously crazy.

"They could have given us an apology.  EFFICIENT WINDOWS could have
replaced their faulty windows.  That would have been sufficient.  It
would have directed other potential customers to ask about the
aerogel.  It would have told them that 'Efficient Windows' does what
it says it will do.  They could have carried on.  As is, we have no
evidence whatsoever that new windows will not fail the way the old
ones did.  Your talk here is about purchasing a potentially faulty
product."

"But will anyone notice?"  asked the president.  "I certainly did."
The physicist interrupted the president before she could go on and,
Filgard presumed, say that she did not care.

Many professors from the English department and from the business
school looked at the windows as if they had never noticed the blue
checkers before or had forgot their appearance.  But Filgard saw that
a good number of physicists, mathematicians, and engineers nodded
their heads vigorously.  They noticed.

"Remember," said the physicist, "we are installing windows to last
more than two decades; we do not want them to be faulty for two-thirds
of that time.  And my hunch is that we will not replace them until the
passage of many more decades than two.  People will spend their whole
careers in this university with faulty windows.  Good people will
avoid us."

That last phrase grabbed the president's attention.  "What do you
mean, good people will not come?"  "Well, to my certain knowledge,
since they told me," said the physicist, "two good people asked about
the windows.  We had selected them.  I mean the people.  We also
selected the windows.  We wanted the people in our faculty.  But after
being told that neither you nor the company had said or done anything,
they declined.  One of them told me, 'That indicates what the
administration is like overall.  I am better off staying were I am.
At least, the people running the place notice mistakes.  They would
have the law department draw up a tort; it would be good practice for
the students.'  That is what he said."

An older man in the math department rose up.  Filgard did not know
him; the man kept to himself or to other mathematicians.  At meetings
he was silent.  But this time he spoke.  He said, "Three have told me
that faulty windows are the reason they did not come.  They would have
been interesting.

"You know that, in a sense, it is not relevant where people are
located.  We can communicate much more easily than a century or two
ago.  But still, unplanned communications convey many ideas that would
not come otherwise -- conversations 'by the water cooler,' as they are
called.  That is why we seek good people.  Well, I know you seek them
because prizes and awards will help you raise money.  Nothing wrong
with that.  But you threw away prizes and awards.

"It may well be that administrators, business people, English
professors, and the like are not sensitive to their physical
surroundings.  So they do not care.  They pay attention to their human
surroundings.  They tell the rest of us to get used to physical
problems; they urge us to adjust to unnecessary incompetence.  But
many of us are sensitive, do notice, and do care."  He sat down.

The president looked flustered; maybe the physicists and
mathematicians were all crazy; regardless, she did not want to be
accused of throwing away money.  "We will defer the issue," she said.
One of the engineers spoke without rising, "That is only one of the
issues of efficiency and competence."  The president looked even more
flustered, but pretended not to notice the interruption.  She went on
to another topic.

The meeting improved Filgard's spirits.  He felt bucked up.  The
university might never eschew stupidity, inefficiency, and
incompetence, but at least a few of the old guard protested.  It was
good to see that happen.

Then he got back to his project area and Peter Dev, one of his
graduate students, made him depressed again.  Filgard thought well of
the fellow.  Peter could explain engineering.  Moreover, he not only
focused on engineering, he read other books, too.

"It makes sense," Peter said, "that ADVANCEMENT INC. would want to
watch what we do.  After all, we are one-half of oligarchs', our
rulers', biggest practical threat.  No one is going to stage a
political revolution, at least, not in the rich countries.  Rulers
need not worry about that."  He paused for a moment, looking at
Filgard's face.  Filgard nodded.

"But they, or at least a few of them, will attend to real dangers.
For many, the big threat are von Neumann machines that produce
material objects as a side effect of replicating.  Rapidly reproducing
von Neumann machines mean that what people want costs nothing, at
least, that the material objects that people want cost nothing.  Were
that to happen, the corporations that currently make the objects would
go out of business."

"What do you mean, we are one-half?"  Filgard asked.  "We are the
recording half of the threat," the student said.  "The other half is
manufacturing, making copies of what we record.  That half has only
developed part way."  He looked at Filgard again, who seemed ready to
listen.

"Spray-droplet technology," said Peter, "means we can build metal and
plastic devices.  So long as parts are separated by sufficient
lubrication, we can manufacture separate parts in position.  With
decent droplets, we can duplicate ball bearings in their housings and
do that more cheaply than assembling them.  Rapid reproduction is
amazing."  He repeated himself, "It is amazing, and it means that
engineering design becomes very different, even though structural
rules stay the same.  You can see and test the results of your design
quickly.  But that is a digression."  He focused his eyes on Filgard's
face.

"A good way to track what we do is to pay us to record how to
manufacture expensive and complex machinery.  That tells how good we
are.  And if you pick machines that are not going to be duplicated
widely, even if they become cheap, you can sell manufacturing rights
and pay for the cost of keeping track."

He looked at Filgard.  "Think of the implications of generalized,
rapid reduplication, even what we have now.  By duplicating the
machines for mining, refining, and granulation, we could cut the cost
of inputs dramatically.  And if we used high resolution droplet
sprayers, we could inexpensively manufacture new sprayers that work at
conventional resolutions."  He used the word 'resolution' to mean the
size of a sprayed droplet of metal, plastic, or lubricant.  The
droplets were so small that regardless of composition they could
easily be melted in flight by a laser and then frozen by the cold of
what they hit.

"Even if we cannot do everything an atomic assembler could, even
without complete closure, we are ahead.  In the end, with spray
technology, we may only see a factor of ten increase in efficiency.  I
expect more, but who knows.  Still, that is the same sort of factor
that enabled the industrial revolution to threaten and sometimes to
destroy the old elites.  The people who manage the new dinosaurs have
reason to worry."

Filgard said, "They wasted the planet; they had cheap energy,"
referring to the people who had come in the centuries before him.  The
graduate student understood.  "Yes, yes, they did that; they had
that," he replied.  "But they also built with fewer inputs than
before.  Sure, their pricing of fossil energy was screwed.  They did
not take into account the long term or distant costs of what they did.
They did not have to count the cost, so they didn't.  That was an
important subsidy."

Peter continued to speak.  "Many people were not even aware of that
subsidy.  You know, even for sensible matters, like smoke in the air,
people criticised government regulations as costing extra rather than
being a recognition of what was already being spent!  They did not
link private health spending, government action, and someone else
dumping smoke into their breath."  He shifted back to his main topic.
"Still, the old-time industrial revolution engineers also figured out
how to do more with less, and much more with the same amount.

"Look at the university's windows."  They both turned to stare at the
windows with blue checks.  "Yes, they are faulty.  We all know that.
But even though they were built with three levels of glass, with
complex aerogels, using vacuum pumps and so on, when you take into
account everything, including especially the flow of energy through
them and their frames, they are better than single pane windows.  And
that is even though they failed.  Over fewer than ten years, whether
it be land to grow wood or some other direct solar converter, or
whether you mine your energy in an oil well or something like that,
this kind of triple-paned window ends up consuming less."

Chapter 5
*********

When he reached home after his inspection trip, Vallen found his
managers judged him successful.  Both the production and sales they
saw increased, not much, but a little.  In fact, as Vallen knew,
production had increased considerably more, but the sales to move the
car parts were not the sort that could be reported; and they weren't.
Vallen's managers rewarded him with a perk.  It cost them nothing,
cost the company little, and was not transferable; it was not, as the
economists liked to say, fungible.  It was a trip on the company
yacht, HAPPY TIMES.

Vallen and his wife, Jennifer, walked up the gangway.  The ship was
fairly large.  An engine powered it.  It lacked sails and three
stories rose above the first.  Vallen remembered he should call them
decks, not stories or floors.  Except for deck, gangway, and a few
other words, Vallen thought in landlubber terms.  He remembered that
starboard was right and port left.  On the ship, he mingled with the
buyers and sales' people that justified the ship's tax existence.

They planned to go on a cruise out of the bay and into the deep ocean.
It would be two days of luxury and networking.  Vallen and his wife
were good at both.  He was very happy he had married the woman.  They
were not close; it had never occurred to him that they might be close;
but she knew how to support a rising corporate manager.  It was, he
thought, a good arrangement.

The yacht was fine.  His cabin was not too big.  It had a window, a
porthole, Vallen remembered to call it.  The porthole was covered with
a curtain.  The cabin's only bed was double and fit into a wall.
Storage lockers fit below it and above it.  The locker below, a big
drawer, was empty.  That above contained life jackets.  On the room
side of the bed, the only side open, it had a fence that you could
raise or lower.  The barrier was covered with leather.  The crewman
who showed him in asked him to please raise it at night.  "It will
keep you from falling out of bed if we run into big waves," he said.
"We do not expect to; none are forecast.  But forecasts have been
wrong."

The only blemish was outside of Vallen's room.  There were no panels
on parts of the wall in the hallway.  Bare metal showed instead.  The
old panelling had been removed.

Vallen learned that the fellows who were going to glue in new panels
-- they were made of wood and had wall paper on them -- could not
afford to come to work because of higher fuel prices.  Or the company
that employed them directly could not afford to carry them.  Instead
of their two buses, the company that organized them had to find a
single, more efficient and bigger bus.  It had not done so in the
hours before sailing.

Vallen figured the workers must be illegal or extra-legal.  Either
way, his own company would pay less.  Less skilled workers, he
wondered if in practice they were less skilled, might take a little
longer, but they were considerably cheaper than citizens; and the big
robot companies did not permit prices to drop sufficiently that humans
could be replaced in general.

In any event, his company's president asked Vallen and several other
relatively junior 'guests' to do the job.  Vallen saw this as a test
and enthusiastically accepted the assignment.

The job was not that hard.  The panels were glued into place.  They
and the glue-guns were already on board.  Vallen wondered whether the
stated reason the subcontractors had not come was true or whether the
job had always been intended as a test.  Vallen decided the reason was
true and the president of the company got to where he was because he
could always turn a disaster into an opportunity for the company's
backers.  It was, Vallen thought, a good-to-know instance of a general
lesson.

So Vallen started gluing panels into position.  It was a little
tricky, since he wanted the straight lines on the wall paper to move
across the wall without any jagged jumps.  But other than that, it was
not difficult.  It was not as hard as gluing on rolls of wall paper.

Nonetheless, one of his fellows worked more quickly and less
carefully.  His lines wiggled.  Vallen complained.  The man turned and
said accusingly, "You sound like an environmentalist.  What is your
concern for craftsmanship and the future?"  Vallen responded simply,
but loud enough for others to hear, "We are going to be walking beside
these soon and for a long time."

After finishing the wall, Vallen and Jennifer washed up and went to an
event in which the food and drink were so good he did not feel
unsatisfied although he ate and drank sparingly.

A little later, on his way back to their room, Vallen saw several of
the crew use a fancy machine to push a narrow but long pipe into the
cracks between panels the man had put up, spray something behind them,
and then use multiple suckers to pull whole panels off the metal wall.
On the backs of the panels, he saw the glue and the spray, which
bubbled like foam.  The crew washed off the panels and the walls.
They sucked up the liquid with an industrial vacuum cleaner and dried
each barren segment of wall with a hot blow dryer.

Vallen never saw his co-worker again.  Instead, the swell changed.
The yacht had not yet left the bay before.  He did not see any people
fix the wall, but some did.  Vallen decided that crew glued up the
panels again, quickly and neatly.

Vallen felt he could relax, albeit carefully.

Chapter 6
*********

At work after the yacht trip, one of Vallen's employees brought him a
budget for manufacturing.  Brimming with confidence, Vallen said, "I
will look at this, but I am sure you did right.  Now, produce a budget
for sales, presuming we go into a new country with quite different
beliefs and marketing practices than those we are accustomed to."  The
man asked Vallen, "Which country?"  Vallen named it.  It lacked a huge
group of people who could afford legal prices.  Vallen expected to
sell more parts extra-legally than legally, and more cheaply, too.
But the number of those who could buy legally was not too small; that
number justified imports and the sales campaign.

The accountant had expected Vallen to speak as he had, but had not
expected his new confidence.  When he returned to his own office, he
commented to a colleague.  "Some time since I last saw him, the boss
decided he could tackle anything.  Maybe he can, too."

His colleague thought it was the yacht.  "Usually, that kind of favor
implies a test of some sort.  I bet Vallen knows he passed with flying
colors.  He is smart.  He is going places."

Vallen figured out that people attributed his added confidence to the
yacht trip.  He did not tell them otherwise, but he knew the bribe
filled him.  The yacht trip only helped.  His poise signalled others
as well as himself that he had done well.

As for the bribe: he liked it.  He did not or shortly would not have
to depend entirely on one company in one country.  Still, he did not
dare live more grandly than his overt income permitted.  He feared
being found out.  He did not store his extra income in a local bank
either.  The tax man might discover him.  There were advantages to
living in a country that mostly enforced laws, like more personal
security, but there were difficulties, too.  'Softly, softly,' he
thought.  Even so, on his overt income he lived well enough for
comfort and for show.

In a sense, Vallen decided, he was helped by his discretion.  Rather
than spend the money for immediate pleasure or for show, he planned
for a more distant future.  He was not quite sure what he planned for.
All might go well in his conventional life.  But he was smart enough
to 'expect the unexpected,' as the phrase went.  That is what he kept
saying to himself.

Rather than just depend on one bank that might fail or might act
against him, Vallen chose several accounts in several countries, at
different banks.  More banks meant more chance that one would feel
enough pressure to check him out, or even have incorruptible
employees; but he could simply walk away if that happened.  He was
sure that would not cost more than fifth of the total, or a quarter if
he had to bribe officials.  He would not like it; he did not expect
it; but it was doable.

Later, he would invest in land and buildings.  That would be after he
had more and learned more.  Of course, the extra accounts meant more
travel, but Vallen picked places he would visit anyhow.  The new
accounts meant only that he would conduct inspections more frequently.
'So,' Vallen thought to himself, 'I will gain a reputation as a tough
and thorough manager.  Not bad.'  Vallen figured that without having
to write anything down, he could remember five false names and all the
ancillary data that went with them.  Five pretend lives.  He could do
it.

Chapter 7
*********

Taffod Dowwen talked himself into receiving a tour.  He realized after
only a few moments that the plant did not advertise but was ready to
give tours.  He had not needed to be so persuasive.

The 'energy conversion site' was in an area close to what had been
called the Black Forest.  The site had not yet received a short name,
even thought it had been around for years.  It suffered an acronym
that no one liked and which did not cross languages.  Taffod noted
that the acronym did not appear in signs.  Then he realized that with
the appropriate software, it would not save anyone any time to use it
internally in memos.  'Maybe the acronym would vanish!'  Taffod raised
an eyebrow.  'That would be a benefit of the modern world,' he
thought.

At the site, dead trees were cut.  There were many in the area.
Taffod wondered whether they had been killed by acid rain, by climate
change, or by a mixture of causes.  At the same time, workers planted
fast growing saplings.  They would be harvested after the dead trees
were gone.

The place provided sustainable energy.

The wood, plus water, went into an on-site refinery.  There, the
mixture was converted into several substances.  Part became a
flammable gas, much of which was used to run the refinery; the rest
was shipped out.  Waste heat generated electricity; most of that left
the site.  A good portion of the wood (and the hydrogen in the water)
ended up as liquid fuel.  Taffod used it himself.  Like everyone else,
he found it convenient to posses energy in liquid form.

Only a small part of the liquid fuel was used on site.  Outsiders
bought the rest; a few purchased the solid residue, which went as
fertilizer.

The refinery interested Taffod only a little.  Mostly, he saw metal
pipes and containers; he did not know enough chemistry to care what
went on inside.

The armored log thrower interested him more.  It looked as if the site
manager expected that, since the log thrower was the last part of the
tour.

Originally it had been a small backhoe, though not the smallest.
Rather than have wheels, it rode on tracks like a military tank.  In
British parlance, it moved around 'on its own flat feet.'  The backhoe
had a cab, engine, and movable arm mounted on a plate that could turn
independently of the treads.  It could cross rough ground.  Unlike a
tank, it could not move fast.

By mounting a second power source on the spinning part, as well as a
storage bin, a conveyer belt, a thrower, and the electric motors they
used, it could shoot chunks of wood quite a distance.  The hoe carried
the thrower; the conveyer belt was flexible, and carried wood from the
storage bin up to the thrower.  By raising and lowering the hoe and by
spinning the cab, the operator could aim.

Except for the windows and the port out of which logs were shot, the
whole machine was covered with thick metal plates.  They were backed
with ceramic and more metal.  Outside the original windows, which
still remained, were thick sheets of bullet proof glass.  The armor
was an add-on.

The tour guide showed it all.  The door to the storage bin was counter
balanced.  The guide had no trouble opening it.  The bin was huge.

The guide, Henry, told Taffod, "Tossing chunks of wood produces a
device that is less lethal than a machine gun, but not less lethal
than a microwave denial device or something like that.  The latter
kills only one in a thousand or so.  If logs fall on a crowd, they
will kill more.  However, logs are visible."

He went on.  "Early on, we were attacked as much for show as for
anything else.  A major goal was to get videos of us killing unarmed
protesters -- I don't think the protesters thought that, but I am sure
their leaders did.

"By throwing logs, visible logs, we indicated that we were ready to
hurt, but we were not ready to use guns.

"People ran from the falling logs -- the operator intentionally aimed
to miss.  As far as I know, no one was hurt in the one protest that
occurred.  This machine made for wonderful video!"

Taffod smiled.

"Of course, it would have been easy for a professional hit man to hide
among the protesters and shoot.  He would have come to infuriate the
guards but could stop the thrower without hurting the driver.  We
suspected that was part of the plot."

Taffod nodded.

"That is why we attached armor over the backhoe.  That was expensive!
We could not simply use metal plates we had; a hit man could carry a
strong weapon.  It could penetrate whatever we had.  He could stop the
cab from spinning.  That would effectively open up the site.  The
backhoe could not turn quickly or accurately enough on its treads.

"We had to armor the whole backhoe well enough so that only a big
military weapon could get through.  Nobody was willing to risk that."

Henry turned away from the log thrower.  He looked over an open field.
Taffod vaguely remembered seeing a picture of it with protesters
filling one end.  He remembered a plume of logs falling two-thirds of
the way across the field, in front of the crowd.  'Yes,' he thought to
himself, '... good images.'  He listened more.

"Essentially, the protesters were against the enhanced trees we plant;
their financial backers were against carbon dioxide sequestration
unless they could make a great deal of money."

Taffod nodded again.  That is what he understood.

"The protesters," Henry said, "feared that genetically modified trees
would spread all over.  Indeed, if we did not insist on strong safety
precautions, they would be right."  It was not people at the site that
insisted, but people in the regulatory arm of the government.  Taffod
grimaced to himself, but understood that people in the site supported
this government action.  Henry went on, "We are safer with these trees
than with alien insects catching rides in airplanes and ships.  Those
insects are not genetically modified, but can come without
competitors.  They can spread all over the place.

"As for the backers, they feared a drop in profits."  Taffod noted he
was being told this by a tour guide.  The fellow was well briefed.
Henry continued.  "The financial backers feared that they would lose
business to companies who were not forced to bury any of their carbon
dioxide.  Either they did not believe that the government would
identify the right products and tax them; or they expected that
certain imports, like windows, would be permitted regardless."

Taffod nodded.  'Interesting,' he thought.  'This is less attractive
visually than the log thrower, but more important.'

"European governments," Henry said smiling, "have had a great deal of
experience with smuggling."  He grinned.  "I know this for sure, since
some of my ancestors were on the other side."  Taffod wondered about
the present, but did not say anything.

"I don't think that nowadays there can be much.  Certainly, no one is
going to smuggle trucks and the like.  Doubtless, some items are
smuggled," Taffod almost grinned; the man went on, "... but we are
talking locomotives.  They are not going to get smuggled and then
operated illegally for twenty or thirty years."

Taffod felt safe in nodding again.  He did not know anyone who
smuggled locomotives into a law abiding country.  He could imagine the
buyer and seller of a second hand backhoe agreeing to tell the tax man
a lower price than actual.  That way, they would avoid some tax.  But
for new locomotives, a batch of them, in a transaction watched by
competitors, in a region where senior people were not bribed much?  He
doubted illegality.

"Permitted imports are another matter."  That comment surprised
Taffod.  He had not expected Henry to say anything about 'permitted.'
He paid attention.  'Maybe,' he thought, 'that was the intention.  In
that case, we will see that permitted imports are not relevant.'

Henry explained.  "That triple paned window with an outer layer of
glass and plastic, so an errant ball does not break it -- that is a
good idea.  Except, we do not have many kids.  We do have a few.  But
even the poorest ones play in parks; they seldom play where they can
break windows.  We can put in windows without plastic."

Taffod nodded again.  'That fits,' he thought.  Henry went on, "I can
see the argument: a window with an outer layer of plastic with glass
on top of it, so it does not scratch easily -- a window with plastic
costs more.  An extra tax on it will make it cost even more.  That is
true.

"But if you think of the extra tax as a payment for not burying carbon
dioxide from making plastic, then the extra cost vanishes.  Without
the tax, you are receiving a subsidy.

"The only argument left is that triple paned windows reduce heat flow.
There is no argument about that.  They do reduce heat flow.
Fortunately, you mostly don't need to worry about errant balls
breaking all glass windows.  And when you insulate your roof, you
don't need to worry about winter ice, either.  Most of the time, you
do not have to be afraid it will gather itself, melt, slip off, and
break a window.  So we could have windows without plastic.

"But that is neither here nor there.  Any kind of window is permitted
for imports, yet the only kind I can buy contains plastic and has no
carbon dioxide sequestered."

Chapter 8
*********

The venture capital company provided Filgard's group with a large,
complex machine that could make a special kind of paper.  It barely
fit into the recorder's cavity.  The machine took a long time to cool.

And then, after it was recorded, which meant it was totally destroyed,
the spray-droplet duplicate refused to start.  Just in case the
problem had to do with the spray-droplet machine and not with the
recorder, a second duplicate from the same recording was constructed
by a machine from a different manufacturer.  That duplicate refused to
start, too.

Filgard had talked about the difference between theory and practice;
he had warned his students and everyone else that even though his
simple recordings duplicated right, more complex duplicates might
fail.

Still, this was the first time he had been responsible for so costly a
failure.  The destroyed machine cost more than his annual budget.  It
was humbling.

Fortunately, his group could record, and in the process also destroy,
both non-working duplicates, the failures.  They compared the two new
recordings; they were identical.  Filgard's group compared one of the
new recordings with the original.  It too, was the same; that is to
say, Filgard was precise in his language, all three recordings were
identical.  So the problem was not in either of the spray-droplet
machines or in the recording; it was in Filgard's recorder.

Peter found what looked to be the problem, a complex interaction
between two otherwise good subsystems.  They modified the recorder and
then made a different record.  Filgard had high hopes.  Indeed, the
next duplicate started.  But then it broke.

After two more expensive iterations and some of the hardest work
Filgard had ever done, a duplicate worked and kept working, exactly
like its original.

Then they tried recording a different machine, one used in truck
manufacture.  It also was large and complex.  Its duplicate appeared
to succeed.  Everyone cheered.  That evening Filgard and his wife
celebrated.  The next morning, Filgard saw that several of his
graduate students had celebrated even longer than he.  But he did not
say anything.  At that point, he and they learned that when installed
in a truck, the duplicate's output caused another part, completely
unrelated, to jam.  Something was wrong.

It took three expensive iterations to create a version of the recorder
that produced recordings whose duplicates' outputs did not cause
trouble.

The next type of machine produced duplicates that failed in yet
another way.  It took four iterations before that machine could be
duplicated properly.  Then every different machine that was copied
made records whose duplicates did well.  The spray-droplet
manufacturers produced good, working copies.

Just to be on the safe side, ADVANCEMENT INC., the venture capital
company, funded another recording of an instance of the original paper
making machine.  They wanted to find out whether Filgard was creating
a machine-specific recorder or a more general one.  Filgard found that
his recorder was too complex for him to imagine all the
interrelations.  Each part was fine; but then, they always had been.
The interrelations caused the trouble.  So he worried before and
during the test.  Fortunately, the new record succeeded.  A duplicate
worked fine.  The test cost a fortune, but Filgard decided it was in a
good cause.

The venture capital company sold licenses for spray droplet
manufacturing.  First it made money which replaced what it had spent;
then it made a profit, then it made a huge profit.  The companies
buying the licenses found their costs dropped.  They made a bigger
profit, too, even charging less.  The companies which purchased the
duplicates were happy; they paid less.  Even the final customers felt
they gained, since they, too, paid less -- not much less, but a
little.  Hardly anyone noticed that most prices stayed high.

One of the features of the 'Meldon Recorder', as the venture capital
company insisted on calling it, was that it worked a great deal faster
than similar machines.  Filgard did not think much of that.  He used a
bunch of old tricks.  They mostly centered around having fewer
illuminators than parallel recorders.  Of course, he had to make sure
that the recorders worked in step with the illuminators.  No one else
had been able to do that, but Filgard did not consider that a problem.
On the other hand, he did recognize his cutter design.  That had been
hard.  Not only had it to cut and to cut quickly without much raising
the temperature -- to avoid excessive thermal jiggling, the
temperature had to stay near absolute zero; and to be practical, the
recorder had to be fast -- but the cutter had to last.

Filgard began to figure out how to make his recorder's cavity bigger,
the cooling faster, and the machine itself more transportable.

Chapter 9
*********

All was going well.  Vallen knew he had made two important jumps in
his career, one that he could not talk about, to receive bribes, and
the other that he could mention, his trip on the company yacht.  His
wife, Jennifer, did not look older, although she was.  She lived a
nearly independent life from him.  They did not quarrel.  Their two
children, a boy and a girl, Jeffrey and Janice, were two years apart
and entering adolescence.  Neither embarrassed him in public nor
fought him.

So Vallen planned a barbecue.  It would be his first in years.  He had
an outdoor barbecue stove, but had not used it for a very long time.
If it rained, he and his guests would go inside, but that would be
unlikely.  Where he lived, plans could be made a long time ahead.

Jennifer was good at picking guests.  She mostly chose subordinates, a
few seniors.  She also chose a few who were not in the company at all.
Their role was to serve as entertaining outsiders, as misfits.

To be safe, Vallen planned to hold a barbecue for his family first.
He wanted to see what could go wrong.  He was not expecting his son,
Jeffrey, to tell him that the stove was now illegal!

"It cooks perfectly well," he said.  He was not quite sure of that,
since he had not used it for so long; but it had worked fine the last
time and he could not see anything wrong with it.

"That is not the issue," Jeffrey replied.  "I was told at school that
the problem demonstrates scaling.  No single stove is dangerous.  Each
works fine.  But when you have too many together, too often used, then
you have trouble.  Each puts a little smoke into the air.  In an empty
or near-empty world, that would blow away; no one would care.  But
here, we have too many in one place.  Even though we often have wind,
concentrations build up.  That is the problem."

"So, what do we do?"  asked Vallen.  "We buy a modern barbecue, one
with an electric blower to move the smoke through an electrically
heated catalytic converter," said his son.

"I know what you mean," said Vallen.  "I have seen advertisements.
There are only two or three companies that make that kind of barbecue.
There must be a price leader and price followers.  I bet they do
oligopolistic pricing.  That is what I would do.  That would keep
prices even higher than all the extras.  We live in a country where a
local government can afford to send aircraft and sensors overhead to
discover who is doing what.  They can enforce the rule.  And nobody in
power cares about the high prices."

"Well, we don't care about the prices either, do we?"  asked Jeffrey.
"No, not at all," said Vallen.  "It is just that this whole notion
pisses me off."  Both his wife and his son were struck by Vallen's
language.  Usually, he spoke in much more elevated words.  He was
unhappy.  Jennifer moved to placate him.  "We cannot live in a rural
area.  There are no jobs.  This place is not bad, not at all.  Just
expensive.  And, as you said, we can afford it.  We will have to buy a
modern barbecue.  That is all."

Vallen used his regular, legal income for the purchase.  As far as he
was concerned, it was not a big deal.  Still, he saw again that more
resources for him meant his freedom increased.  This purchase cut his
resources a bit.  He did not like it.

'Well,' he thought to himself.  'Very likely, the scaling issue is
real.  The catalytic converters are a needful limitation on what we
can do.  I should not be too upset about oligopolistic pricing.  That
will happen in any industry so long as there are few manufacturers or
few sellers or one or the other are controlled.  In any industry with
increasing returns to scale and no regulation, there will be just a
few or there will be just one.  It will be the one which grows bigger
sooner than the rest.  Each item it produces costs less.  So it will
put competitors out of business.  That means just about every modern
manufacturing industry.  It exactly fits what we were taught in
school.'

Vallen considered more.  'Of course, in successful companies, no one
will support change.  That restraint will turn those companies into
losers when technologies change rapidly.  But I think the rates of
technical change are slowing.  Everyone complains, but I think that is
because the changes they have to make are unpleasant, like buying a
more expensive barbecue.  People do not complain about changes they
like.'

Vallen could not think of any ruling group that imposed only
limitations that were needed by everyone.  Rulers would, if they were
smart, impose limitations that were necessary.  He knew there had been
rulers, like those who had ruled in the Lebanon when cedars still
grew, who were not smart enough.  They didn't preserve the cedars.
The rulers vanished.

But in addition to needful limitations, rulers, whether of businesses
or countries, always imposed limitations that helped them, like higher
prices.  As a university student, Vallen had conceived the possibility
of the opposite, but he had not seen any like that in contemporary
practice.

He felt that by becoming disillusioned, he had grown up.

The test barbecue went off well.  The prime ribs tasted great.  He
even got to sit down for a moment.  Forestalling his son, who looked
to be preparing to say something, Vallen explained his understanding
of innovation.  He said it was important.  Because of innovation he
kept making a profit and this kept him being employed.

Vallen did not believe his words; he spent more time thinking of
people than of technology; but it was a good story.  And to some
extent he believed.  He certainly believed when he spoke.

Vallen thought that the leading man determined it all.  That meant
that a person who looked like a leading man received good pay.
Neither Vallen nor any one else in his world thought to support the
people his engineers depended on.  They had a movie view of
innovation.  Vallen saw the hero, whom he persistently called the
scientist, as critical.  That belief was false, but Vallen did not
deal much with engineers and people like them.  He did not understand
that he had been fooled by entertainment.

Vallen also thought but did not tell his son that technical progress
led to income disparities.  'Let Jeffrey discover that for himself,'
he thought.  'He will learn that many organizations and cultures fail
to adopt a more efficient method.  Those which do adopt one, those in
control which do, get more.  At least, they get more in a competitive
market.

'Indeed,' he thought, 'with technological advance, an economy might
help only some.'  He considered again a proud stone cutter, who worked
with hammer and chisel, and a programmer who worked with symbols.

He said to himself, 'The unemployed poor lack income from ownership.
Tax transfers are small; welfare, that is what those transfers are
called.  Nobody likes them.  The unemployed poor simply lose.  Of
course, the unemployed rich differ.  No one refers to their not
working as unemployment.  A few stone cutters ended up owning
quarries; a few programmers gained from stocks.  But they aren't many
compared to the total population of the planet.'

He talked to himself quite a bit.  Well, it was useful.  And he
certainly could not talk with others.  Those that understood would
either be above him or below him or be competitors.

He kept thinking.  'The new technology only requires that it pay for
itself.  It is society that determines how benefits get spread around.
And if society is mostly extra-legal, like most societies on this
planet, no one can force the spread of benefits.'

Vallen knew the argument for taxes on people like himself -- to him,
an increment of benefit mattered less than such an increment mattered
to a poor man or woman.  He already had enough.  But he did not see
taxes levied fairly.  More importantly, he was not going to be a
sucker.  He did not like that idea at all.  He was not going to give
someone else a free ride.  He paid a tax lawyer and sought bribes.

He wanted more, but he had not got it yet.

The bigger barbecue succeeded, although Vallen did not get a chance to
sit.  He decided he worked harder than at his office, but that he was
at a level where he should give more barbecues, many more.  It was
good politics.

Chapter 10
**********

Someone came to speak at the university.  It was advertised as a talk
about 'the current situation on the planet and what we can do.'
Filgard did not know anything about it.  Many speakers visited.  He
paid no attention.

But his graduate student Peter Dev went to the speech.  It was Eltis
Akthorn who spoke, a stranger.  Afterwards, Peter spoke glowingly of
her and of the speech.  He spoke to everyone.  Peter even said that
Eltis mentioned their project!  Filgard heard.

Peter kept talking about Eltis -- Filgard noticed that Peter referred
to her by her first name -- so Filgard looked at a picture.  She was
young and beautiful.  'Hah!'  Filgard thought to himself.  'He is
attracted to her as much as to her message.'  Filgard could not
imagine living with her.  He felt old.  Still, Peter had said that she
had spoken about the recorder.  Filgard decided he could scan the text
of her speech; it could not be more than six or seven thousand words
and most likely, he could skip major parts of it.  Maybe he would find
something useful, although probably it was not worth reading.  Why
anyone would go to such an event, he could not imagine, although they
did.

After an introduction and a poor section 'to tell them what I am going
to tell them', Akthorn started with a short description of the damage
being done to the planet: how human actions were moving gigatons of
earth, over-cutting forests, over fishing, mining soil faster than it
was recreated, mining energy, and causing yet more climate change.

Filgard thought that people should know already about these actions,
but on the one hand, most acted as if they didn't, and on the other
hand, would nod when they heard.

'So ...', he thought, 'maybe most act rationally.  After all, there is
very little anyone can do as an individual, in a family, or in a small
group.  At the same time, by employing a known theme, Akthorn can
introduce her ideas gently.'

Filgard thought to himself a bit longer.  'There are three things an
individual can do without needing to be part of a large group: as a
scientist, he or she can discover; as an engineer, he or she can
invent new technologies to repair the planet; as a politician, priest,
or regular person, he or she can explain the situation.'

He laughed to himself, 'the three Rs,' he thought, 'research, repair,
and reveal.  They are better than doing nothing.'  As an engineer, he
was an inventor, repairing the planet.  (He did not think of the costs
of innovation and the involvement of others.)  Akthorn was revealing
the situation.  Maybe she was planning to become a politician.

Next, Akthorn said that the choice is to go forwards or backwards.
'This is right!'  thought Filgard.  'Just what I have been saying.'
He laughed again at himself.  'Because I agree, I think she is right.'

Moreover, Akthorn spoke of technology.  She did not hope for changes
in human character.  She said, "Fundamentally, I do believe, as has
been said for millennia, that 'Man is Fallen', where the word man has
the old-fashioned, inclusive meaning of women, too."

She must have paused in her speech, because the next sentence started
a new paragraph.  "I am not saying that there cannot be changes in
human character; indeed, there have been."  She did not say anything
critical; instead she said, "What I am saying is that a political
movement should not depend on such hopes."  There was no pause in the
text, but there had to be in the spoken speech.  She said, "Like an
army or business, a political movement must go with what we have."
'But,' thought Filgard, 'she has not yet talked about her political
movement; the speech does not make sense.'

"What we have are existing technologies."

Akthorn repeated herself: "We can go forward or we can go backward.
Those are the only two choices.  We cannot stay where we are because
we cannot continue to damage much longer a finite ball, this Earth."

She spoke of the 'Meldon Recorder' as a great invention.  Filgard had
to agree with Peter, he liked that.  Akthorn said that in combination
with spray-droplet devices, another existing technology, the two could
enable humans to live well and longer.  That is what Peter had said.
Filgard thought it was true, not simply because the 'Meldon Recorder'
was named after him and he liked the praise for his portion of the
technology, but because the claim was objectively true.  He still had
not learned anything.

Akthorn also spoke of yet another invention, a cheap but fast
propulsion system for vehicles in space, a mini-magnetospheric plasma
device.  "This does not work," she said, "without a big vacuum, plenty
of nothingness."  She provided a few more details, "Even though it can
provide more thrust than an ion engine, it cannot push hard enough in
the normal course of events to escape a large gravitating body."

Filgard had to look up the invention.  He had not heard about it.  It
existed.  Indeed, 'mini-magnetospheric plasma propulsion' had first
been described in the 20th century.  Still, no one had developed it.
Akthorn blithely ignored possible technical failings.  Filgard
wondered how much it would cost to get one to work.

But, as Akthorn said, it enabled the use of space resources on human
terms.  "It means that with existing technologies, we can manufacture
inexpensive light-to-microwave-to-electricity systems from nickel-iron
planetoids.  But all this is opposed by many who would personally
lose, although others favor long term safety."

Filgard decided she sounded familiar.  "The alternative is to go
backwards," She detailed examples, "Food and fuel will cost more.
Ocean transport will still be cheap," she said, "but it is expensive
to grow food in a desert.  Old farmlands will become new deserts,
either because people have extracted fossil water from aquifers or
because of continuing climate changes.  That is what going backwards
means."

She talked about poorer heath.  "No one will pay drug manufacturers to
develop new antibiotics to defeat bugs that have grown resistant to
the old.  Neither the money nor the capability will be there."
Filgard wondered about that.  He thought there would be a little
money.  The necessary changes were small and the new techniques
dramatic.  But it was not his field and he did not know the answer.
He did not think that very many in the audience knew either.  He
figured that even though they too did not know, they would agree with
Eltis.

She said there would be a few who were not much hurt at all by going
backwards, "... not immediately," she said.  "The powerful will not
be; others will be hurt."  However, by going backwards, the powerful
would lose, too.  She said, "Nonetheless, they will not know how much
they lost.  After all, inventions will not be made and few dream about
what no one knows."

She asked the audience to press for the future.

So far, Filgard noted with a little irritation, that was the only
action she had asked of her audience.

It might be rational for an individual or a person in a small group to
do nothing, or to engage in one of the 'the three Rs', to research,
repair, or reveal.  Still, Akthorn spoke politics.  Yet so far, it was
more a report, an analysis, than anything else.  He wondered whether
administrators, politicians, and the friendly rich would see the
implications, or would they just pass them by?

It was obvious to him that knowledge would benefit all, that research
should be funded, especially long term and apparently useless
research.  He also saw that governmental restrictions on knowledge
transfer, like patents and copyrights, should be reduced.  They should
not be treated as if it were the divine right of owners to restrict
knowledge.  Such understanding was not necessarily obvious to those
who had the power and the interest.  In the past, patents had been
promoted as a way to overcome restrictions, but nowadays they lasted
too long.  So did copyrights.  Copyrights lasted a very long time.

Either way, going forwards or going backwards, Akthorn said, the
planetary human population had to reduce.  In going backwards, this
would be more painful than in going forwards.  "Countries," she said,
"with a low total fertility the past quarter or half century, and with
little immigration, are already experiencing the difficulties of
decreased population.  Yet this is a benign form of the catastrophe!
It will be harder if they go backwards and easier to go forwards.
Going forwards provides hope."  As far as Filgard was concerned, this
was another commonplace report.

Finally, she spoke of the farther future.  She said, "We have not
learned enough from the Disaster.  Our success in running a planet,
our success in this spaceship Earth, does not require new inventions.
But they would help.  They do not yet exist, but might if funded."
Akthorn said that invention was helped by an encompassing project, at
least so long as the proposed project did not require anything
impossible.

As a good project, she suggested interstellar travel and colony.  The
inventions would be difficult, she said, but could be and would be
made.  Filgard agreed; for a politically acceptable expedition, as far
as he knew, the necessary inventions were not scientifically
impossible, but were hard, very hard.

In particular, Akthorn said, interstellar travel required a duplicator
that works with individual atoms and a way to copy living organisms
and have them live again.  "We need atomic duplicators," she said,
"because a future colony will have to build things from scratch once
it gets to a distant planet.  An interstellar spaceship will not be
able to carry anything big.  And we need to be able to copy living
organisms because we will not have the space to carry them live.  The
information recording them will have to be compressed."

"Such a duplicator would help this planet, too.  It would cut the
costs of production, especially of computers that are made of small
parts.  It means that what we humans need could be produced off planet
and brought down in computer controlled aeroshells.  We could survive
well on this spaceship of ours."

Filgard noted the speech's structure:

        - current situation dangerous
        - existing solutions
        - fight with existing evils
        - result of fight unforeseeable
        - distant hope

Akthorn ended with a 'told you what I was going to tell you' section.
As far as Filgard remembered, the speech did not quite follow
Aristotle, but came close.  He agreed with its contents.

As for the structure, it came across as 'warning, solution, danger,
hope', bad, good, bad, good.  Filgard thought that Akthorn made a fair
statement; but as far as he was concerned, it was not very useful.

Still, Peter's attraction stuck by him.  He showed a video of the
session to his wife, Fairta, and offered her a transcript although, as
he expected, she did not bother with it.  She said, "Eltis is
attractive.  I bet she would make Peter a good wife.  Let's host her
next time she comes."

Chapter 11
**********

Not much time passed before Eltis Akthorn came again.  As Fairta
planned, they hosted her.  Eltis came in for a late dinner; she would
stay the night and speak the next day.

At dinner Eltis asked Fairta how she occupied herself, "besides
cooking this wonderful meal."

Fairta explained that, among other things, she was a violinist.  She
played in the university orchestra and spent hours practicing.
Filgard said, "The time is almost too much, although I am usually at
work, so I don't know how much time she spends."

"I do not practice enough!"  was the retort.  "I like playing, but I
have other things.  I have you!"  she said to Filgard.

"To be very good," Fairta said, "I would have to be more dedicated.  I
am not.  Also, I would have to be a bit more talented.  Still, music
is a good hobby."

Her eyes lit up.  She smiled.  "I am a good writer, too.  Both of you
only pay attention to the content of what you say."  She directed her
attention to Eltis.  "I listened to your speech.  I listen to how
words' sound.  You don't.  That is a flaw.  The contents are fine."

Looking at Filgard, she said, "I know that engineering has not been
around since the birth of language.  I mean as a profession.
Engineering has been around for a long time.

"Engineering as a profession lacks the long history of traditional
subjects.  You would have a hard time sounding well at the same time
you write precisely about building a complex device.  But Eltis is
doing something different; she is explaining how things are and what
to do.  She needs to pay attention to her rhythm.  I have some ideas."
She looked at Eltis.  "We can try them out on Peter tomorrow.  Besides
knowing many non-engineering topics, he is an engineer's engineer.  If
I ask the right questions, he will be honest.  He will tell us what we
need to learn."

Then she shifted.  "On another topic," she continued like an imp, "not
engineering, not violins, not sound -- but it will intrigue you, both
of you."

"What is this?"  asked Filgard.

"It is an extension of what I suggested to you before you went on that
trip to try to raise venture capital, an extension of the notion of
Galen's temperaments," she said.

"Over a generation ago, the anthropologist Alan Page Fiske talked
about four social structures.  They come from the way people perceive,
although I don't know whether Fiske said this.  How people perceive
is, I think, wired into how the brain works.  A half century before
Fiske, a fellow named Louis Guttman claimed that all forms of
measurement belong to one of four types of scale, four types of
measurement: categorical, ordinal, interval, or ratio, or are
conflated into one of those four.

"Guttman was talking about measurements.  Fiske extended that to
social structure.  My claim is that people perceive those four
patterns.  For everything else, the details are different.  There are,
or were, huge numbers of different cultures on this planet.  People
act differently from one another.

"Fiske claimed that his four patterns fit different primary
mathematical structures.  (He may have proved the discovery, so the
claim does not depend on his say so; but I don't know.)"

She stopped for a moment, to let them consider that only four patterns
supported everything, then she continued.  "It is easy to understand
the four patterns, categorical, ordinal, interval, or ratio:

   - "One animal is a cat and another one is a dog -- a cat fits a
     different category than a dog.

   - "In an army, a captain is superior to a lieutenant but you cannot
     say by how much he is superior (and indeed, the 'how-muchness' is
     irrelevant).  Soldiers follow orders; ranking is 'ordinal.'

   - "You cannot meaningfully say that one Fahrenheit or Celsius
     temperature is twice another.  That is because those temperature
     scales have an arbitrary zero; they are 'interval scales.'
     However, you can add ten Fahrenheit degrees to a Fahrenheit
     temperature.  You can subtract twenty Celsius from a Celsius
     temperature.

   - "Finally, you can say that this stone weights twice as much as
     that stone.  Weighing requires an ratio scale.

"Fiske claims that from these four patterns, we can construct all the
types of human social pattern that we see: that from the categorical,
we get all the ethnic and religious conflicts, us or them, we get
nationalism, as well as sharing, the goodness of being in a family.
From the ordered, we get corporations and empires, as well as being a
child taken care of by parents.  From the interval, we get voting and
civil rights.  From the ratio, we get complex societies and free
markets.

"My notion is that the four Galenic temperaments reflect preferences
for one or the other pattern.

"My temperament is optimistic; I prefer the present time and want to
make beauty.  Galen called my temperament Sanguine.  It fits the first
pattern, the categorical.  Maybe a third of the world is like me.

"That pattern is not practical for a complex society.  I am talking
about a pattern of perception, of society that I prefer.  That does
not mean I cannot see other patterns, it is about what I prefer."
Then she repeated herself.  Her statement was new to Eltis: "Some
people do well in many different ways and older people gain skills,
too."

Fairta continued.  "In any case, for a society, a more practical and
extensible pattern is the second, the hierarchical.  My hunch is that
the people who do well in that kind of social system are the
Melancholic."  Again, she said much of what she said earlier to
Filgard but this time to Eltis.

"Such people work hard.  They have common sense and are conventional.
They want to perceive the more and the less.  In a society, a
hierarchical format fails when you need to make rapid changes; but
when you don't, in a changeless world, the pattern works fine.
Somewhere between a third and a half of everyone fits this
temperament.  It is the biggest."

"We are not in a changeless world," said Eltis.  "No, we are not,"
said Fairta, "but that is neither here nor there.  I am trying to link
four preferred modes, which are four mathematical forms, with four
possible temperaments."

"OK, I understand," said Eltis.  "Please go on."

"The third pattern fits the Choleric.  It is like a Fahrenheit or
Celsius temperature scale.  You can add similars for the physics.  For
the social, it is where you get the same in return for what you put
out, like a dinner invitation.  Well, not in this case; we are hosting
you.  But often.  Or you enjoy doing the same as another, like vote.
This temperament has fewer than one in ten people in it.

"The fourth pattern is yours," she looked at Eltis and then at
Filgard, "both of yours.

"That temperament is the Phlegmatic.  You, and people like you, love
discovering things, love making things.  So does everyone else, but to
a lesser extent.  You love being consistent.  That is the social side.
Fewer than one in ten, perhaps fewer than one in twenty match this
pattern."

"The portions do not add up to 100 percent," said Filgard.  "No, they
don't," said Fairta.  "Maybe there is something else, maybe not; maybe
the measurements are wrong.  This is all vague."  She stopped but
Filgard did not say anything more.

"I am being Phlegmatic now, although I have an easier time with and
prefer the Sanguine."

"What do you mean," asked Eltis, "you prefer the Sanguine?"

"I can talk as you do, abstractly, be consistent, and all that.  I am
adaptable, but it is not me."

"You make more sense to me now than when you talk about other things,"
said Filgard.  Fairta looked smug and at the same time happy.  "That
is because you don't pay much attention; you don't value other things
much, although you will agree that two fried eggs on toast is a
necessity for breakfast.  That is the sort of thing I especially
notice.  You get involved in something else.

"In any case," she addressed both of them again, "much progress in
science and engineering comes from changing the default perceptual
pattern.  (You will notice I am using your language: 'default
perceptual pattern.')

"For many centuries, people said 'it is cold outside.'  Cold was a
category distinct from hot.  Then people came to say 'it is colder
today than yesterday.'  This is an ordinal scale.  After the invention
of the thermometer, it because possible to say 'it is 10 Fahrenheit
degrees colder today than yesterday', making use of an interval scale.
Finally, after Kelvin and Boltzmann, an engineer could say 'the
thermal energy content of this piece of iron is 0.6% less than it was
yesterday', making use of a ratio scale."

Fairta smiled again.  "As for me: I prefer a categorical scale.  I
like something to be true or false.  I play a piece of music right, or
I play it wrong.  It is hot out or cold out.

"In horseshoes, the closer shoe wins.  I notice that it wins.  It was
thrown right."  She spoke an aside to Eltis, "The game of horseshoes
is similar to quoits; it is, or was, common in America."

Then she spoke directly to the two of them.  "In horseshoes, you do
have to measure.  You, that is to say, all Phlegmatics, would notice
that.  But I don't.  For me, the salient question is whether you won
or lost.

"Traditional logic presumes a statement is either true or false.  I
guess this is why I prefer it over the more modern kinds, the fuzzy
logics.  The metaphor for my kind of logic comes from early experience
with a cup.  Either your proposition is contained, like water in a
cup, and is true, or it is outside, spilled, and is false.  The
categories are inside, true, or outside, false.  There is no third
option."

Both Eltis and Filgard started.  They ducked their head.  Each
independently thought of drops on the edge of a cup.  But neither said
anything.

Fairta stopped for a moment, then went on.  "It just occurred to me:
do people with a Choleric temperament create the rituals that the
others of us follow, at least sometimes?  Someone has to have created
the rituals.  They are one of the ways that lead to numinous
experiences.  Obviously, especially in pre-agricultural societies,
rituals are emergent.  But someone had to do the job.  Me, I don't
care, although I can contribute to what others have created.  Geniuses
can compose music; I can play it.  The Melancholic can make sure that
cathedrals do not fall down ... But who cares enough about people, and
at the same time, does not care about the lack of falsification
implicit in sacred postulates?"  Her eyes glinted.  "... at least, the
lack of falsification for sacred beliefs you believe in."

She let everything go for a moment, then returned to her subject.
"Who likes actions being the same, whether a group of people all do
the same together or one person repeats over time?  The Choleric,
that's who.  Rituals all involve swaying together or singing together
-- or different people repeating the same activity at different times
-- well, maybe not _all_.  My point is that these features of a ritual
do link people together.  They help people feel a 'time out of time,'
feel the eternal."

She made sure she had the attention of both of them.  "In your terms,
the evidence for ancient temperaments is faint.  Sure, some people fit
them.  But do enough fit them for those categories to be useful?"

She laughed, "People often categorize others.  You know the old joke,
'there are two kinds of people, those who categorize others and those
who don't.'  Everyone understands, although some prefer not to put
people into categories."

Fairta went on.  "My evidence linking Fiske's social structures and
Galen's temperaments is essentially zilch."  She grinned.  "I think
they fit because they feel right, but that does not help you at all.

"Why," asked Filgard, "if they are true, have we forgot the
temperaments?  Their truths must be determined before we can even
consider a link to Fiske's social structures."

"Maybe," Fairta said, "the new institutions of the latter 19th century
required people to focus on another category."

"Yes," said Filgard, "new types of corporation and new types of
university became common in the 19th and 20th centuries.  They needed
to recognize people with analytical skills, whether they be cognitive,
utilitarian, or both.  That would be a good reason to ignore past
concepts then.  But what about the present?  Why don't we know?"

Fairta liked that.  Filgard had always known more than simple
engineering.  "Maybe, the notions were truly false and best forgot,"
she said.  "Or maybe the concepts are becoming important again."  She
smiled.

"Anyhow, the claims will intrigue you.  You will mull them over as you
fall asleep.  I am sure of that.  I know that you both think of
yourself as different from each other, one more a teacher, a builder
of objects, the other more an organizer, a builder of political
parties."

"I'm an organizer," said Filgard.  "Compared to Eltis ... ?  It is
true, I am not into politics."

Fairta's eyes danced.  "You are both very similar.  You both focus on
producing, you both organize what you need, you both consider the long
term.  And ... you both prefer to forget our guest room, even though
you agree it is important."  She looked towards Eltis, "Let me point
you to it."

The next morning, after a breakfast of fried eggs and toast, an
'English breakfast' even though they were not in England, Fairta said
to Eltis, "Abstraction is not right.  It is not the right concept."
During the night, she had been mulling things over, too.

"What is this about abstraction?"  asked Eltis.

"It is often said," Fairta explained, "that Melancholic and Phlegmatic
people are better at abstraction than Sanguine or Choleric people.
Yesterday, I said, 'I can talk abstractly.'  As a practical matter, I
think the notion is irrelevant."

She was sitting with a cup of coffee.  Eltis drank tea.  "Some of what
I do with music seems abstract to those who do not play the violin or
piano.  But to me the notions are concrete.  To me, a chord is
something I do on a piano with my hands.  Specifically, I think of a
major chord in C. I think it has to do with practice."

Eltis caught on immediately, but spoke to make sure she was right,
"You are talking about concrete words.  You are saying that people
like you prefer what you can point to or pantomime.  You are
suggesting that people like me prefer the abstract."

"Yes," said Fairta, "except that I don't think the distinction between
concrete and abstract is useful.  Everyone learns to conceive of
abstractions.  Everyone talks about heaven and hell, love and hate.
You cannot point to those notions.  They are definitely abstract.  You
can only point to people in love or full of hatred, people going to
heaven or going to hell."

Eltis nodded her head.  "I see what you are saying."

"Suppose," said Fairta, "that what you think of as an abstraction is
the base for an example.  Then, the issue is what examples come to
mind.  What are the referents?

"Some categories have fewer intrinsic referents than others.  When I
think of birch, I actually think of white birches with a paper-like
bark.  That is a type of birch.  There are birches whose bark is not
white.  But as far as I know, there are fewer types of birch than
there are hells.  But a discriminator that depends on fewer and more?
That is no good.  No two people will agree on the boundary.

"Maybe the distinction should be between words as direct signals of an
entity and of indirect signals, metaphors.  But some think of hell as
a metaphor, and others think of it as a definite place."  She stopped
for a second, but Eltis did not say anything, so she continued.

"Most people," said Fairta, "treat what are called 'abstract words' as
'exemplar words.'  They handle them as words that carry examples.
They may not be conscious of the distinction they are making.
Phlegmatics like you make sure the definitions are consistent and
complete.  Everyone else, more than ninety percent of the population,
treats them as they do other kinds of word.  You would say 'vaguely;'
I would say, 'relevantly to the conversation.'  That is key.

"To be more precise," Fairta nearly laughed; she understood Eltis
well, "two groups will care for consistent and complete definitions:
one group are people with your temperament; you care naturally.  The
other group consists of people who are forced by law or logic.
Everyone else goes for examples.  That is what is relevant most of the
time.

"Those people who are forced by law or logic -- they will hate the
pressure.  That means they will dislike law and logic."  She grinned
at Eltis.  "They are not like you are all.  You like logic.  And you
like sensible laws, those that preserve personal autonomy.

"As for an example, when you talk about 'hell', I see people burning
in a fire.  That is what the word brings to mind.  The meaning of the
word is abstract; no one can point to hell.  But I can talk about it.

"I know that some hells involve cold, people frozen in ice, not
burning.  That does not matter.  As far as I am concerned, the image
brought up by the word is just an example.  The notion is familiar.
That means that even if it is abstract, I can use it readily.  That is
what counts for the vast majority of people.

"My point ... "

"You have a point?"  asked Eltis, interrupting and smiling.

"Yes," said Fairta.  "My point concerns what you suggest."  Eltis
looked startled.  "It is," said Fairta, "that it would be useful to
spend time in school on concepts like 'faintly suggestive evidence'
and 'strongly suggestive evidence.'  You could show examples and kids
could work with them.  Then the concepts would become familiar.

" 'Practice, practice, practice.'  That is the answer to the old joke,
'How do you get to Carnegie Hall?'  The critical point is that those
who go to Carnegie Hall not only are talented but they enjoy
practicing more than the rest of us.  They are willing to practice
longer.

"People will learn when they are forced; they learn poorly -- we
frequently force school kids; they learn, but not very well.  As a
practical matter, most will not learn about differing degrees of
evidence very well.  Who cares?  That does not mean the concepts are
useless.  They are useful.  That is why the concepts and examples
should be in school."

Eltis looked thoughtful.  "What about saber-toothed tigers?"  she
asked.  She was trying to think of an entity that could be pointed to
before language.  It was not the immediate issue, but she had been
thinking.  "They were important; they killed many people when our
species was young."

"What about cars?"  said Fairta, who was accustomed to back
references.  "They are also dangerous.  It takes a while for kids to
learn to avoid walking unexpectedly into roads.  The word 'car' is a
general one; the word 'saber-toothed tiger' is specific.  I could talk
about the danger of specific types of car, a type you could point to.
Our ancestors did the same.  They pointed at saber-toothed tigers.
Dangers exist now just as they did then.

"Obviously, many things were and are important as entities to which
you can point.  Saber-toothed tigers were only one of them.  The foods
you eat are others.  What I am saying is that heaven and hell, love
and hate, are also important.  As far as we know, people have always
discussed them.  They have always have been important.  Nonetheless,
the concepts are abstract.  You cannot point to heaven.  You cannot
pantomime love, yet everyone talks about it."

"Yes," said Eltis.  She paused and looked quite fierce.  If Fairta had
not known that face was just a thinking expression, she would have
been scared.  "Yes," Eltis repeated.  "Everyone talks about love, even
though it is an abstract notion.  That is true.  ... I have got to
reorganize my life."  "You mean, your thinking life," said Fairta.
"Yes," said Eltis a third time, after only a momentary frown.  "My
thinking life."

She had not said anything about school.

Peter listened to Eltis practice.  The speeches were better.  He said
so.  He never realized that Fairta was putting him together with
Eltis.

Chapter 12
**********

As for 'needful limitations' in a society: Vallen thought about them
one weekend as he was getting ready to go to the beach.  He was still
bothered by the barbecue.  Buying it stuck in his mind.

More people living together meant he, as one of them, had to have his
impact limited.  The more opportunities to act, the more people, the
more energy each had, the worse it got.  A straightforward analysis
made limitations evident, at least once someone discovered them.  The
theory of conflict and cooperation was quite practical.  The impact of
the barbecues' smoke, the total losses, did not become relevant until
many people lived together.

Vallen liked the theory's notions; he had learned something after
kindergarten.  You could decide what a society should do.  You added
up the total of losses and gains.  (Vallen did not think about the
difficulties of measurement.)

A society had to adopt a stable course.  It could not be negative
forever.  It would collapse.  A total might go negative after a period
in which society was unstable in a positive and desired direction.
Vallen thought all that.  Costs and profits depended on the number of
people, their impacts, and their locations.  In this case, the
solution was to control barbecues in a built up area.  That made
sense.  Cities needed sewers.  Controlling barbecues was similar.

Vallen wondered whether he got ahead in his work because of his study
of game theory.  That is what the theory of conflict and cooperation
was called.  Most people below him did not think of it everyday.  They
did not live the concepts.  They were not looking for 'stable
strategies.'

They did not make multivariate analyses either.  They depended
strictly on their human connections and on confidence.  They acted as
if the whole world could be understood as human action, not just parts
of it.  They treated the inhuman world as if it were the human world.

Vallen was not like the other kind of person, an engineer or scientist
who focused entirely on the non-human world.  He did not look only on
those parts of the human world that could be predicted in an inhuman
way, like electrons or like the rate of suicide in west European
countries in the late 19th century.  Indeed, he did not like the
non-human world.  He had had enough of it in school.

He packed several more towels.  His family always needed them.

He had to admit, however, rates of warranty return, rates of sale,
rates of profit -- they were all predicted more or less correctly by
non-human means.  He had to understand those predictions so he could
set expectations.

He selected strategies that would succeed even when events went
against him.  He thought of them as coming from his studies, but they
were rather conventional: make backups; always expect the unexpected;
but don't expect too many of them.  Fly during the good years.

As a practical matter, Vallen was in a division that produced
specialized car parts.  What if their sales went down?  Well, then he
could switch to other specialized parts.  If the whole economy went
down, then he would not be doing worse than others, so it wouldn't
matter.  But if it was just him ...

If he knew a need to switch and knew what he wanted, he could switch
quickly.  That is why he insisted on daily sales reports and why he
kept learning more about various trades.  It was vital insurance.

It was a good reason for Vallen to keep his eyes peeled.  Another
product might be useful.  He never thought that in a different, more
senior job, he would end up supporting Filgard Meldon.

His two kids got into the back seat, his wife, the front.  He thought
of his two children as 'kids' even though they were getting older; and
he thought of everyone by their roles.  He grunted.  It was not an
unpleasant noise.  He was telling everyone he knew they were there.
But at home, he often was not social.  He kept on thinking.

'As for corruption,' Vallen thought, 'rulers could make it more
difficult.  That went without saying.'  It would cost more, but he
knew that two cops or other investigators could patrol together.  Or
more than two, since the payments for corruption could be very high.
That is why Vallen split up his fortune.  He might lose -- he did not
expect to, but he might lose.  An anti-corruption drive might hurt
him.  He wanted to be resilient, like the planet should be, but
wasn't, at least, not in any duration relevant to humans.

Vallen knew there were a whole bunch of techniques for controlling
corruption, standardly written up.  'Fortunately,' he thought, 'mostly
the powers engage in evasion or excuses.  They do not try to prevent
corruption, even when it harms themselves.  Nor does anyone else.'

Vallen figured that evading or excusing the practice was crazy for
rulers -- he remembered that Ferdinand de Marcos, a dictator in the
Philippines, had not evaded or excused; he wanted the money for
himself.

The issue was what a society's components would do.  Most of the world
did not have governments as strong as his.  There were too many
corrupt people.  Or maybe the governments were corrupt.  Vallen
considered that dangerous.  When governmental organizations were
corrupt, rulers would not be able to enforce needful limitations, no
matter how smart.

Vallen wanted to survive; he wanted his children to survive and to
live well.  He wanted the same for his wife and friends.  Incapable
rulers could be more dangerous than letting the powerful charge high
prices.

But Vallen went along with higher-ups' craziness.  It helped him
personally.  As far as he was concerned, these men, they were mostly
men, did not know they were evading or excusing the issue and hurting
themselves in the process.  They were skilled fools.

Or maybe, he thought differently than before, they were like him:
skilled, knowledgeable, and excellent actors.  Maybe they were corrupt
and that is how they ruled.  They hired people who were corrupt, who
took bribes, as he did.  Either way, he enjoyed a bigger chance to
become rich.

'If they plan for a long enough time, if they think ahead far enough,
the rulers of a country can do well for their society, too.'  Vallen
kept thinking of those in Japan who kept the country forested.  He
could not remember who did it or when.  Still it helped Japan.  He
also remembered that they, too, presumed an unbounded Earth, a flat
Earth; that is to say, when they had the opportunity, they had trees
cut down elsewhere.  They exported deforestation; they would hurt the
other countries first.  Eventually that practice would hurt everyone
on Earth.  It was a ball; it was not flat.  But in the meantime, a
time that might last many lives, a few benefited.

The whole family arrived at the beach.  Vallen had not been aware of
the drive at all.

Chapter 13
**********

Eltis Akthorn came again.  This time she planned to focus on
traditional social and political technologies, but with a difference.
She stayed with the Meldons.

Fairta partly rewrote Eltis' speech.  Together the two invented and
introduced the four 'Ps' and the five 'Rs.'

These lists, they were lists, would not work in many other languages,
or they would not work as well.  The leading sounds would not be the
same.  But as Fairta said, "You are not writing an engineering
treatise that you know is going to be translated into another
language.  You are speaking in English to an audience of English
speakers."  Eltis had to agree.

Fairta knew the substance of what Eltis should talk about: "You need
to talk about degrees of evidence and determining them.  Most people
like me will not like what you have to say.  They won't know what you
mean.  You need to introduce appropriate examples very early on.

"You can take an old example, one that led to legislative action and
is not controversial any more: thinning of bird's eggs.  That was seen
in the 1950s.  In the United States, the national bird, the Bald
Eagle, was going extinct.  You cannot look at just one nest.  Even a
stretch of several years is no good.  A single nest may bias you one
way or another.  It is not like you are eaten or left untouched by a
saber-toothed tiger.

"So you need to talk about degrees of evidence and how to determine
them.  Evidence tells you what is real.  Then, you can say that after
gathering evidence, our representatives must be responsible for
considering reliably, with rigor and reason, the reality of their
decisions."

Eltis practiced her new speech.  "Those are the five 'Rs.'  They are
memorable: _responsibility_, _reliability_, _rigor_, _reason_, and
_reality_.

"That does not say anything about evidence," she said to Fairta.

"You are wrong," Fairta said.  "It does.  It talks about _reality_.
You can only approach reality through evidence.  Otherwise, it is easy
to be confused.  But you are right, it is not direct."

"That evidence tells you reality, that makes sense," said Eltis.
"Unfortunately, I have not figured out how to fit all this together
into a speech.  Let me keep trying with what we have got."

She went on, "Political decisions must always _protect_, _preserve_,
_prepare_, and _provide_ for us."

In English, each topic started with a 'pr' sound.  Eltis wondered what
the sounds would be in other languages.  She hoped her speech would be
translated.  At that point, the alliteration might fail.  She
continued.

"Politicians must protect us against inhuman enemies, like snow
storms, typhoons, and climate change."

She was aware of following Fairta, at least in part, going from 'snow
storm', which everyone in her immediate audience would have
experienced, to 'climate change', which might be somewhat vague.  She
wondered about that part of her audience that was not immediate.  Many
would not have experienced snow storms.  She did not know how to talk
to them.

Eltis went on.  "Politicians must also protect us against human
enemies, especially as the technologies of destruction become more
efficient.  When many people among your enemies believe in a
'plausible promise,' in a cause that excludes you, you are in danger.
Warfare becomes or can become more asymmetrical.  Defense requires
more thought."

She stopped for a second.  For many listeners, the notion of a
'plausible promise' would be new.  On the one hand, maybe she should
not mention it; she did not want to confuse people too much.  On the
other hand, a plausible promise convinced people.  However plausible,
the promise might be false.  Certainly, that is what people thought of
their enemy's beliefs.  Fairta was right, more emphasis should be
placed on evidence.  It was not simply that people had made judgements
for centuries, but they had to learn to judge everything; or they
would not know whether they believed a true or false promise.

She did not know what to say.  So she said simply, "Defense is
_protect_, the most fundamental action."

She stopped longer and finally said at normal speed, "That last
sentence is good.  As for more of my speech ..."

She spoke again at her slower, speech speed.  "Most politicians will
be conservative.  That includes many who appear radical.  In the
United States in the 1930s, President Roosevelt was like that.  Many
thought of him as radical, but he acted to preserve American society.

"As we humans gain more power over nature, we are going to have more
impact.  That means that to preserve us, our governments will need new
tools.  The old mechanisms, like the old notions of what you can do
with real estate, they will have to go."

Fairta spoke up, "You are not conservative, not in the political
sense.  You are acting to conserve humans.  You will do that even when
it costs current society.  You think, as I do, that our current
society cannot be protected and preserved, that attempts to do so will
fail."

Eltis listened as Fairta said, "What you are doing, and what
politicians must do, is prepare us."

Fairta went on, "In particular, they must prepare us for the long
term.  I do not handle the long term well.  No one does; not anyone
like me who thinks short term.  On the other hand, many who think long
term, like Filgard, fail in the short term.  They are stupid.  Only a
few do both well.  A politician succeeds in multiple short terms.  If
he or she fails just once, he or she fails.  A politician is like a
person descending a chain; if any link breaks, the politician falls.

"But politicians have to prepare us for the long term.  That is their
duty.

"I have to say, my preference truly is short term.  But that does not
mean it is impossible for me to think otherwise.  As I grow older, it
gets easier.  And in any case, I never was extreme.

"My point," said Fairta, "is that the four 'Ps' of politics can be
remembered by English speakers.  They are _protect_, _preserve_,
_prepare_, and _provide_."

Fairta returned to a point she had made on an earlier visit.  "School
children need examples for determining the quality of evidence, weakly
suggestive, strongly suggestive, that sort of thing.  That fits into
the 'reality' part of the 'five Rs,' _responsibility_, _reliability_,
_rigor_, _reason_, and _reality_."

"How am I going to do that?"  asked Eltis, speaking more to herself
than to Fairta.  Then she said to Fairta, "You mentioned the idea of
exemplars in that dinner where you got us thinking about traditional
temperaments.  Or maybe it was the next morning.  You were saying that
most people think in terms of examples, or at least that is how people
think when the object designated cannot be pointed to or pantomimed.
You said you thought of white birches, to which you can point, when
anyone mentioned birch trees.

"You suggested that children learn examples of differing degrees of
evidence just as they learn examples of the notions of heaven and
hell."

"Right," said Fairta.  "Schools should teach examples for thinking
about degrees of evidence.  Obviously, people have thought about those
degrees for generations.  Children learn them.  I am talking about
making the examples formal, fully spelling out the criteria."

"But it is not only evidence that needs formal examples," said Eltis.
"The other of the five 'Rs' and four 'Ps' all need them."

"Yes, that is true," said Fairta.  "You need many examples."

She went on.  "You can show failures in each of the five 'Rs' and four
'Ps' through history.  Failures tend to be more memorable than
successes.  They make dandy illustrations.

"Thus, in the 1770s," said Fairta, "the English government did not
consider reliably the reality of the asymmetrical war that George
Washington led against them.  They did not investigate with _rigor_
and _reason_ why they were winning battles and losing the war.  They
were not _responsible_.  They did not apply the five 'Rs.'

"Each of those notions, _rigor_, _reason_, _reality_, _reliability_
and _responsibility_, is worth an essay.  That way children can be
forced a little, as I was."

"Maybe kids should not be forced at all," said Eltis.  "After all, as
both you and I know, they won't learn much except to hate you and the
concepts."

"That is true," said Fairta.  "But how do you guide kids so they want
to learn these particular items?  The whole point of an education is
that children don't have to go down false trails.  I don't know how
you could meet the challenge."

"You are not that kind of teacher," said Eltis.  "I don't think it is
a temperament issue; I don't think any of those things you talked
about have anything to do with this.  I think there is a sequence that
you don't know but that some professionals do -- not those who think
of themselves as higher in a hierarchy than they and who force
children, and not those who figure that children are as good as they
and let them happily walk over cliffs, but others."

"Hmm ...," said Fairta, "you used the word 'think' three times in your
last statement.  You are not certain of your conclusion.  By the way,
it is a temperament issue.  The largest group of teachers are like the
largest group of people, Guardians.  They are full of sense and hard
work; but they also think of themselves as higher in a hierarchy than
children.  The next largest group are like me, who know that children
are as good as we are.  But I will let the claim go.  I hope there is
another method.

"Back to history: Napoleon's government failed to protect most French
against his rule or against the notions of the eventual winners.  That
failure came at a time when bourgeois businesses were burgeoning."

Eltis did not say anything about Fairta's comments regarding
uncertainty, although she kept it in mind.  Instead, she laughed.
"You are being carried away by alliteration: 'bourgeois businesses
burgeoning.'  But I am taking your point.  The Napoleonic government
did not protect people.  It did not preserve itself.

"Presumably you are going to say that persons' incomes must be seized,
that is what taxes are, after all, a seizure of others' income -- or
you can say that they are a necessary fee -- to pay for a public
education that prepares children for adult work.  The character of
work changes when bourgeois businesses boom.  Traditional learning, as
peasants, fails."

"Yes," said Fairta, grinning, "... 'bourgeois businesses booming'
prepares them to pay the fees necessary for emergencies and for their
retirement ... that prepares them to provide.

"The four 'Ps' ... _protect_, _preserve_, _prepare_, and _provide_."

Eltis thought for a moment.  "None of these criteria, the five 'Rs' or
the four 'Ps', determine particular directions or beliefs," she said.

"Yes and no," said Fairta.  "On the one hand," she shook her left
hand, "they do specify what a responsible government must do.  They do
determine.  Powerful people can be irresponsible for quite a long time
-- far longer than anyone lasts in government, even hereditary rulers.
So this criterion does constrain individuals.

"That is why the Japanese government, in coming out against
deforestation, acted responsibly in the Eighteenth Century.  Its
actions took and lasted generations.  So yes, these criteria do
specify particular beliefs, or maybe a better word is habits.  When
you use the word belief, the vision that comes to my mind is that of a
fundamentalist preacher arguing with a quantum physicist."

"When I hear the word 'habit'," said Eltis, "I think of a woman in a
Catholic religious order, wearing old fashioned clothes, a 'habit.'
But I take your point.  The criteria tell people to act in certain
customary ways."

"On the other hand," Fairta shook her right hand, "so long as beliefs
are not falsifiable -- and here I am using the word 'belief'
intentionally -- and so long as beliefs' applications serve the
society, anyone can believe anything.  Thus, the Earth has people with
Buddhist, Moslem, and Christian beliefs all at once; and none of them
will contradict those who consider those beliefs all too limited."

Eltis frowned.  "What if your belief system is too limited?"

"Well then, it won't work," said Fairta.  "There are some people in
every religion who think too small.  For success, a system must be
able to handle different kinds of people and different situations.
That is why the great religions survived the collapse of old
civilizations.  They were big enough.  Some of these old religions may
even survive our civilization.  No, the criteria do not point to one
or other religion."

Eltis worked to incorporate Fairta's ideas into her talk.  She started
talking about a 'Melior Movement', where 'melior' was the old Latin
term meaning 'better.'

Regarding evidence, Eltis said the goal is to improve on what people
had done for ever and ever, which is to make judgements, to decide
reality when it is not obvious.

She reminded everyone that courts traditionally operated to put the
accused in one or other category, innocence or guilt, 'beyond a
reasonable doubt.'  That meant people added up degrees of evidence,
slightly, faintly and strongly suggestive.  At the same time, Eltis
said, a good many actions are truly binary or are categorized that
way.

As for the five 'Rs': she spoke of them as what people in government
should do.  "Responsibility and reliability as determined by reality
with reason and rigor."  She also said that most of the time, most
people would not care or know what their government was doing.  But
occasionally, they would judge their government.  The five 'Rs' were
no more than an aid.

Likewise, the four 'Ps', to protect, preserve, prepare, and provide:
for most people, they would be another occasional aid.

People in government could remember, Eltis decided they ought to
remember, the four 'Ps' and five 'Rs.'  They would justify themselves
according to them.  So long as people judged the evidence for those
claims and decided whether they agreed or disagreed with politicians'
and civil servants' values, society possessed a more or less
accountable and lasting system.

Eltis could see why Filgard married Fairta.  Even though she was
different, the woman had ideas and knew how to express them so that
someone like Filgard or Eltis herself paid attention.

Several months later, Fairta fell sick.

Chapter 14
**********

The fellow acted somewhat subservient when Vallen arrived.  He knew
Vallen had not traveled half way around the world to praise him.
Vallen thought the contractor showed considerable spunk.  Clearly, he
thought Vallen was going to take away just about everything he had
built up.

"Our production people," Vallen said, "reject sixteen percent of the
air intakes you send us.  Those castings do have to guide the incoming
air exactly.  They must be exact to five microns."

Vallen knew that for generations, expensive machinery had enjoyed
twice that precision, to two and a half microns, to one
ten-thousandths of an inch.  Casting to that precision was new ... not
too new ... Selling widely, that is to say, cheaply -- that was
somewhat new.

"We are selling a product that boosts acceleration in cars," Vallen
said.  The man knew that, but Vallen repeated it anyhow.  "The extra
acceleration is not much but is enough to notice.  And we do it
without increasing the fuel needed, without increasing liters per
hundred kilometers traveled, or as Americans like to say, without
reducing miles per gallon.

At this stage, Vallen was remorseless.  "The air intake is only one
part of what is a fairly complex device.  The air must be filtered
before it goes to the intake ..." Vallen did not say, but he implied
that he could not afford higher costs or complexity.  "The device is
not part of the car as it comes out of the factory.  It is not
necessary or wanted by enough people.  That is why we sell it.  So
long as the part is not too expensive ... and it works ... we succeed.

"We do not have to order from you," he said.  "You have competitors.
It is not as if just a few companies do precision casting."

Then Vallen changed his tone and his expression.  "We could regularly
order more from you, rather than do it when necessary.  We would
return those that do not fit.  Before assembly, we test each part.
But I am not certain how long you would last with a permanent fifteen
or twenty percent return rate.  It is a good deal cheaper to do it
right the first time.

"After assembly, we test the whole.  That is why we have a good
reputation technically.  What we sell, works."

He grinned, "You are thinking almost entirely of people.  You are just
like me, most of the time.  However, I have discovered that I have to
think of machines, too.  So do you.  That is the key."

The man asked, "What do you mean?"  This is what Vallen wanted.  He
did not want to shift to another supplier if he could help it.



                                 ---


Vallen was on the road, or in his case, in the air, even more.  A
competitor swallowed the main company that assembled various parts.
It's new management felt strong enough to raise its price.  One part
was the device for which he needed the well-cast air intake.  The
company that cast it had not been bought.

Vallen did not think the higher price would help him.  Besides, he
could handle six smaller organizations at once.  They could assemble
the parts.  After picking them, they would make little or no extra
work.  In total, they would produce as much.  He felt sorry for the
people in the big company.  They faced huge lay offs within four
years.

For each of his new contractors, the general manager had to be like
Vallen, a person who mostly liked and thought of people, but who could
understand technology.  He had to be able to think long term and
strategically, too.

The factory bosses had to work hard.  They got parts from suppliers
that Vallen listed, had them assembled, and shipped them.  They should
not want to look too far ahead; most of their problems would be short
term.  As a practical matter, they would be hierarchical.

The research people had to think technically, long range as well as
short.  Their leader had to think both technically and about people.
He would connect to the general manager and to the accountants.  He
would speak to outsiders.

Vallen knew how hard it was to find anyone with those capabilities.
Very seldom could you promote a technical person away from his
laboratory and expect him to be a good interface to people.  Few
people thought technically.  In a large enough organization, you could
find people and train them.  But Vallen was looking at smaller
companies.

Regardless of difficulty, Vallen figured that even though the largest
of his new companies would be only a quarter the size of the previous,
it should have a research department.  At least two more should employ
research people, too.  With ideas more and more restricted, and public
research receiving less and less support, only by funding the work
themselves, and sharing it with allies, could any company succeed.

He laughed to himself.  Patents were a way to turn help into harm.
Except that he gained income from several, none of which he had
invented or sponsored.  But he had seen, early enough, that they could
be used to move resources from others to their owners; and he
purchased shares in companies that owned them, so he became an owner.

He enjoyed patents as a help to him.  Nonetheless, their current
existence was another disillusionment.  He knew that in countries
which enforced law, patents restricted.  It was not simply that they
forced up prices; with the help of governments, they prevented
competition.

Vallen remembered as a youth being told that patents 'promoted
innovation.'  He remembered reading that in the mid-19th Century,
'Scientific American' printed new patents as a way to spread
knowledge.  No longer.

Determining whether a company had a research department was easy.
Determining whether the fellow in charge of it was good or not, that
was harder.  Vallen's people could exclude companies whose head of
research failed to publish reasonably good papers when young.  That
excluded the incompetent and a few of the competent who had not been
smart enough to make sure their papers got into the data bases his
people investigated.  They could look at recordings, too, and exclude
those who badly handled contemporary public relations.  He chuckled.
Outside of the companies themselves, only his people might care enough
to look.

Of those left, Vallen had to meet them face-to-face and ask technical
questions as well as 'human interest' questions.  It was the only way
for him to determine what they were like.

Well, he had to meet the general manager, too, and the factory bosses.
From Vallen's point of view, factory managers were the simplest.
Likely, they would never have got to the positions they held unless
they were smart and hard working.  Incompetent relatives would be
pushed elsewhere.

In a large company, the head of research would be higher in an
organizational chart, but not in any so small.  Vallen figured the
factory managers would treat him as one of the boys.  Or her.  A woman
who knew how to be 'one of the boys' ... she could go far.

For each potential contractor, Vallen decided to have a general
meeting and then individual meetings with the general manager and the
head of research.  He expected to visit ten or a dozen companies to
find the six he wanted.

As he flew to another city, Vallen realized that all he did involved
contracts, whether written or unwritten.  He wondered if others
thought the same way.  He doubted it.  They thought more in terms of
unwritten, human connections.  Except he was from far away, from a
different culture.  Specifying connections both human and inhuman,
which his written contracts did -- that was helpful.

Vallen remembered reading about big, modern companies in the previous
century.  They manufactured in-house.  In the 1930s, an economist,
Coase, wrote about the rise of corporations.  As he pointed out,
corporations allocated resources hierarchically rather than in a
market.  He had argued that when the cost of contracts was higher than
organizational costs, corporations expanded in-house production.

Partly, it was an increase in the size of entities and in the progress
of financial intermediaries.  The companies that Vallen hired could
afford fancy machinery, even though they were in a location that
previously had been distant to bankers.  Partly, it was new
technologies.  It was easier to discover costs than it was a century
before.

Ironically, the new technologies enabled closer monitoring, too.
Corporations could expand in-house production.  Except it would not
work.  People were too different.  Only certain things, like prices
and quantities, could be safely defined.  'Maybe,' Vallen thought, 'my
contracts are enough.'

Vallen was happy.  He liked travel.  He knew he was unusual this way.
He was not a good family man.  It enabled him to do at what he was
best, which was to sniff people out.  Many others were unhappy, even
when they did not travel.  That showed itself by them growing tired
after six or eight hours.  They took week ends off, too.

Several of his older superiors said they grew tired after fewer than
eight hours -- they were surprised they had grown so weak and
predicted that Vallen would, too, "but not for another twenty years."

Chapter 15
**********

Fairta had an unusual name.  That is how Filgard came to know her.
Their leading initials were the same.  As Fairta said, "They
intertwined."  Filgard knew enough to avoid saying that any pair of
letters could intertwine.  He figured that instead of being literal,
she meant they two were intertwined.  That was true.

Even though she knew her desires were different than his, she
understood him well, better than he thought.  Mostly, she thought, her
understanding came from accidents of upbringing.  Her parents had
discussed people's characters traditionally; and Fairta decided that
even if the reasoning was wrong, the descriptions were right.

Thus, she understood that Filgard focused on work or on an idea.  She
appreciated his need for autonomy and his presumption that she wanted
it, too.  At other times, he loved to talk in detail or, as others
termed it, expound.  She could see that because of his focus, it would
sometimes appear that he did not pay much attention to her.  That was
not true; she knew that.  She also knew that she had to disrupt his
focus every so often.  She was good at that.

When Fairta looked peaked, Filgard noticed.  When he suggested she
receive a thorough examination from the university doctors, she agreed
readily.  That was not usual at all.  And when she came out of the
doctors' office, appearing worse than when she went in, Filgard became
very worried.

Fairta was quick to explain.  "The local doctors," she said, "do not
give me a chance.  They say I will be dead within six months, if my
treatment is good, a year if there is a miracle."  She looked at him.
"I feel tired, but not bad," she said.  "I don't want ever to feel
bad.  Do you think they can predict the future as well as they
pretend?"

"I don't know," Filgard said.  "In any case, let's get another
opinion.  We do not have to depend just on these people.  Maybe they
are wrong."

Fairta had already accepted her death; but Filgard had not.

It took longer to set up the second examination than Filgard expected.
It was in another city.  And the results were less immediate.  Filgard
felt frustrated.  Eventually, they came.  They were the same.  The
university doctors were not wrong.  The second team said that Fairta
had less than six months to live.  Nothing could be done.

Both Fairta and Filgard believed that the two groups of doctors were
as good at their art as anyone.  There was not anything that could be
done.  Magic would not help, only pain killers.

Neither would bargain with the imaginary, although Filgard decided he
wanted to.

Fairta became weaker.  She spent more time in bed.  They moved the bed
into the living room on the ground floor; she could not climb the
stairs.  Filgard talked with her more than he had ever before.
Sometimes, especially just before her end, he talked more at her than
with her.

He sat on an armless chair facing the head of the bed, holding her
hand.  He realized that his life could carry on; but that the meaning
of it would change.  He was pleased with his students; he was pleased
with his recorder.  Nonetheless, as he asked Fairta without expecting
an answer, "What good are they, what good is it, in my day by day
world?"  He paused, and answered himself but speaking aloud, "So, the
result is to make trucks a little less expensive.  That is not bad;
that is not evil.  But it is not much.

"You and I will never have children, not children of your body; only
children of our minds.  But what of our successors in a half century
or a century or more?  What of other sentient beings?"  Momentarily,
Filgard imagined beings with tentacles.  He did not limit his notion
of 'us' to a particular breed of human, or to all humans, or to humans
and other possible sentients on the planet, like dolphins and whales;
he included all sentient or all potentially sentient beings.

He held Fairta's hand.  She was lying comfortably in bed.  She was not
saying anything.  Filgard continued.  It was as if he were talking but
it was not; he was thinking outloud.  "Some say we are here as a test
or preliminary.  I don't think so.  I think we are complex, sentient
systems.

"Of course, if you think we are here as a test, then our purpose
already exists; it is to pass the test, like children in a school.
Hmph!," he smiled.  "I give tests."  He creased his forehead.  "I mark
them, too."  He laughed again.  "I must be a god ..."

He stopped after that, then spoke again.  "If you don't think, if you
are non-thinking, if you don't think we need a reason to live, then
you just do.  You just live.  I bet the less aware animals are like
that.  But if you do think consciously, then you either have to invent
a purpose yourself or put the job onto others.  Mostly, people put the
task onto others, their culture or religion.  They are modest."

He did not think about the need for linguistic communications.  Smart
creatures who did not talk, chimpanzees, for example, could not ask
others their purpose.  But any individual could have a numinous
experience.  A chimpanzee could experience the emotions of love, fear,
dependence, fascination, unworthiness, majesty and connection.

Fairta was listening, although she could not move at all.  She thought
of chimpanzees who could not talk.  They were like her; she could not
talk now.  But they had no language.  None could talk.  She wondered
whether they had temperaments.  Two temperaments, the Sanguine and the
Choleric, did not require linguistic communication.  She thought the
two others did, the Melancholic and the Phlegmatic.  She was not going
to find out; she was not even going to be able to discuss the
question.

Filgard thought only of entities who could talk and were about as
intelligent as he.  "It is reasonable to be modest," he said.  Fairta
was not responding at all.  He did not know that she had forgot what
he was talking about.  She liked to hear him.  Eventually, his subject
would make sense again.

Filgard knew people with serenity; he knew people with ideas he would
never think on his own; but he did not know anyone who could come up
with a new, previously unthought purpose.  That was his topic.  He
would not come up with a purpose himself.  He would have to pick an
existing one.

"Stewardship.  That is the only purpose I can think of," Filgard said.
Fairta heard Filgard and suddenly remembered everything.  "In a sense,
that is what I am, a steward.  I help keep education going.  My
recorder is new in only the most trivial sense, that of never having
been built before.  Regardless what the university patent lawyers
claim, none of the ideas are new.  The device required hard work and
intelligence; but it did not require genius."

Filgard stopped speaking for a moment.  He was a steward, an
intelligent steward.  But the question he ought to ask was whether the
culture in which he was a steward was good.

Filgard was not quite sure where that question came from.  Like the
idea of stewardship, it did not come from him.  Certainly, he believed
that his culture was better than many others.  He preferred it over
the alternatives he knew.  Well, he was in it.  'Maybe,' he thought,
'that is the reason.'  But his culture had objective advantages, too.
It was not only that he knew it.

For one, it taught reality, or parts of it taught reality.  That is
what a steward was, he thought, a basically conservative person who
keeps to the past, who makes sure that things are as they were.
Teaching reality was a good habit of the past.  He was silent now.  He
figured he should speak again outloud.

First he said, "I teach reality."  Then he realized that without the
context, the statement was meaningless.  What would Fairta think?  He
went back; he said, "One of the advantages of this culture is that
parts of it seek the truth, more than just the habitual or accidental
truth that you learn very young, more than just the minimal truth that
is needed.  You learn more than if you don't eat, you grow hungary.  I
am an engineer.  The things that we build either break or succeed
regardless of how we feel.  It is not like dealing with your mother,
where your feelings may influence how she acts."

He stopped for a moment.  He had to deal with less familiar notions.
"In our country, resources are not simply transferred from one person
to another.  As an economist would say, it is not entirely rentier, in
the general sense of the word.  In part, we satisfy human needs.  We
are not entirely, maybe not even mostly, ruled by aristocrats and
teachers of meaningless beliefs."  He laughed.  It was almost a cry.
"Well, they never call themselves 'teachers of meaningless beliefs.'
Often or maybe always, their core beliefs cannot be falsified.  Those
beliefs are neither meaningful nor meaningless.  And those that can be
falsified are mostly true.  You can drop a stone on your toe.  After
all, heavy objects on the surface of the planet do tend to head
towards its center!"

He stopped for a moment and thought about Aristotle and his theory of
gravity.  If you dropped a stone, it would fall.  It could fall on
your toe.  There was no doubt about that.  When you did only that
experiment, intentionally or not, you confirmed Aristotle.  Then
Filgard remembered to speak outloud to Fairta again.  "The beliefs'
value is not in themselves, or at least one of their values.  It is
that by enacting them, whether or not you believe them, you tell
others that you are willing to go along with the social customs.  This
is very significant for rulers; actually, it is significant for
everyone.  It is not whether you believe, but how you act.  That is
what counts.  And to be successful and satisfying, beliefs' practical
embodiment must have some truth."

Filgard was not one to base his beliefs on love, fear, or fascination.
Consequently, he never thought of those who believed because of them.
Often such people were utterly convinced of what they thought,
regardless whether it was falsifiable or unfalsifiable.

Instead, he stopped for a moment and then talked about another kind of
ruler.  "Those who possess force, the forceful, must think well of
themselves."  He could not imagine anyone trying to direct others when
that person lacked self esteem or self confidence.

"A ruler has to think of himself as the best.  Otherwise he fails.
The same with a woman ruler.  Originally, the word 'aristocrat' meant
'best ruler.'  At least in classical Greek it did.  Whatever name was
current, a small group would rule a country or nation or city, some by
manipulating beliefs and others by manipulating force.  In so far as
the world changed slowly, they could depend on what they learned as
children, on what the society told them.  They could survive."

Then he turned to himself.  "The trouble is," he said, "me and many
people like me lose in a rentier economy, an economy in which
resources are transferred from one person to another and not produced.
I am not good at the modern equivalent of palace intrigue.  Some are.
In a more rentier society, they gain."  Fairta did not say anything;
she did not move her face at all; it was easy not to.  Nonetheless,
she agreed.

Filgard spoke more.  "The measure of merit changes.  Rather than
reward those who perceive reality -- all of it, not simply useful
parts -- and who know what to do with reality," he paused again, "the
new measure, which is a return to a very old measure, rewards those
good at persuading or forcing others to give up resources to them."

Fairta still had not said anything.  Filgard wondered whether she
listened or could hear at all.  Her steady, but shallow breathing told
him she was alive.

"Some people in the university teach that cultures are the same.  They
are not.  I wonder whether these people know they were shills or
whether they are caught in a false belief, whether they do not know
how to judge.  I suspect the latter.  They are fools, not frauds.

"Well ... they do not talk to me and I don't talk to them; I am
presuming.  But I suspect they are fools.  It is very hard to be a
successful fraud.  There are too many for them all to have been
frauds.  Doubtless, you would say I should not think of them as fools,
but as ignorant.  I hope they are teachable."  Fairta smiled briefly,
but said nothing.

"These people say that two cultures were identical when one enabled
someone to discover Pascal's triangle thousands of years ago and
another did the same -- and leaves out the difference that the second
also enabled and funded other mathematicians to go further."

Filgard wondered how he knew that, and what degree of truth that
statement had.  It was a claim he had heard years before and not
bothered to investigate.  Worse, he was pretty sure that making up
rows of numbers, each number the sum of the two above it, a Pascal's
triangle, led into the calculus of probability; but he was not
positive.

"Actually," Filgard said to Fairta, "I don't know much about the
history of mathematics.  Maybe that is not a good example, even if it
shows the highest art we can imagine, as difficult as a great musical
composition, a scientific discovery, or a play.

"I use a few symbolic tools, exactly as I use a hammer and
screwdriver.  I don't know anything about their history, except that
Philips was the man after whom the Philips-head screwdriver was named.
I don't know about the history of tomatoes or bread, either, although
I eat them.  I don't know about the history of friendship, whether it
be real, projected, or imagined, although I have friends.  I just use
tools, eat food, and make friends."

He kept speaking to Fairta.  "In any case, I have to decide.  Maybe I
have not been positive about this culture, even when I do think it is
better than alternatives I know.  Maybe that is why we have not had
physical children, only helped others' children.  Maybe, more
generally that is why fertility rates are dropping so vastly.  Maybe,
many forgo children not only because they are expensive nowadays and
because educated women have more choices, but because fewer believe in
a future.  Only those who are optimistic or who have little choice
will try to continue their culture in their own children.

"What if the present is a mistake?"  he asked.  "Then the only choices
are to go backwards, to do less damage to the planet and to help
people less; or help people more, while doing less damage, which means
progress."

Filgard thought of progress, of going forwards and backwards in
non-human technological terms.  He was an engineer.  It was evident to
him that a more regressed technology would have less impact on the
planet.  With a sufficiently backward technology, you could presume
the planet was infinite and flat since bad impacts would fade away
before they reached more people.  With such technology, there would be
fewer people, too.  Even China in the old days, as populated as it
was, held fewer people than the present.

He completely forgot Peter's remarks on triple-paned windows, that
over time, they consumed less.

An optimistic, human-oriented person might have thought of spreading
the hurt.  But Filgard did not believe any social system could do
that, not and last.  Some people, perhaps most people, could be
persuaded or forced to enjoy less, to survive more backwardly.  That
could last.  Such people would not investigate beyond the evidence
that they should suffer.  However, Filgard figured, a few would become
rich, if not immediately then within a few generations.  In the long
run, you could not spread hurt equally with purely human actions; you
needed technology.

"So," he said, he skipped over all his previous thoughts, "we should
go forwards.  My recorder is good.  People who support rentier
economies, who support transferring resources rather than making them
-- they will not fund much for a future; they will not provide much
for research and development.  They will not support a future in which
those actions might hurt them even if they help everyone else.  They
are the danger."

He held Fairta's hand.  There was nothing else he could do.  He never
thought of recording her.  He could not imagine the technology needed
to freeze her quickly.  And, of course, the process would be murder,
especially with no method of recreating the healthy parts of her.

Chapter 16
**********

Vallen remembered an old saying, that a sculptor with a hammer
"discovered what was in the stone."  He could not remember where that
came from.  He said of himself that he "saw a person in a log".
Jeffrey, his son, turned the saying around, "... carves a log out of a
person."  Vallen did not like that, but said nothing.  His daughter,
Janice, did not say anything.

His collection of carving knives sat in a wooden box with a green
cloth lining.  Each knife fitted into a built-in rack.

The knife handles were brown and made from a fine grained wood.  They
were like dowels, with a constant diameter.  Sometimes, Vallen
wondered whether that was right.  In any case, each was the thickness
of his little finger and three times its length.  The handles were all
the same; the blades differed.

For a long time, Vallen thought he used one knife mostly.  But when he
watched himself he found that was not true.  He made use of his whole
set.  He started a piece by gouging out wood with a big blade that
curved around like a piece of pipe cut in half lengthwise.  The blade
was semi-circular, not a fan but a partial cup.  It scooped up wood as
wide as and half as thick as his index finger.  He could not call the
quantity a sliver.

For finer details, he switched to smaller blades.  By twirling smaller
semi-circular blades, he could make eyes and nostrils.  For the finest
details, he wore a jeweler's loup.  Otherwise, he could not see the
wood well enough.  Then he scratched it with the point of a
straight-edged blade -- the edge of the blade came up to one side at
an angle of forty-five degrees where it made a point.

The wood Vallen carved was more variegated than the marble of a stone
sculptor.  He found pieces washed up on the beach.  He collected those
that were the width of his body.

Some of the shapes were very strange.  They were eroded by wind,
water, and sand.  In carving the pieces, Vallen found faces and
bodies.  Nothing was what he expected.

Often, the drifted wood was hard.  But his blades were very sharp.
They had diamond edges; he never had to sharpen them.  Once, Vallen
tried a metal knife blade he had sharpened.  It hardly cut at all.
'Clearly,' Vallen thought, 'old timers either cut less, or cut more
slowly, or cut softer wood.'  He knew that some woods could grow
harder as they aged, so he figured old time carvers worked with softer
wood.  On the other hand, some woods were hard always, certain
tropical woods in particular.  Vallen did not think he would have
enjoyed cutting that wood with a metal blade.

Usually, Vallen found pieces of wood such that faces were no larger
than a hand.  They were not full size.  But once he found a piece
twice as large.  He carved a head.  Its face appeared more contorted
than he felt comfortable showing publicly.  So he kept the carving at
home.  He did not burn it; he was attracted to it.  But the expression
looked tortured.

Carving meant cutting away.  For some reason, Vallen liked that better
than adding clay to nothing.  That is how he thought of it, the work
of a sculptor in clay, a ceramicist.  He wondered whether subtraction
was a major part of his character, or whether it was irrelevant.

Ceramicists had to imagine everything.  They could not simply discover
what was there, as could carvers.  He could make strange and good
shapes even though he thought of himself as a poor carver; as far as
he was concerned, considering the kind of ceramicist he thought he
might become -- not very good -- discovery was easier than invention.

Moreover, the hobby was unexceptional.  He could keep at it no matter
how high he climbed.  It was solitary, but it was his prime solitary
action.  He drank with others in the company.  No one besides his son
ever said anything about the strange and distorted figures he carved.
And his son only spoke in private.

Perhaps a few decided he had a tough and dreadful subconscious; 'let
people think that,' he figured, 'all the better.'  Besides, some of
his wooden people looked happy.

Chapter 17
**********

After his wife died, Filgard spent more time in the general faculty
lounge.  It was not the same as the lounge in the engineering
department.  Different kinds of people came to the general lounge.  It
also had a wider selection of food and drink.  Filgard decided that
those who came were mostly humanities' teachers or university
administrators.

One of them was a Donald Tull.  Filgard knew he should remember the
name; but he could not remember what faculty or bureaucracy he was in,
except that he was in nothing connected to science or engineering.

Speaking of students, Tull said, "They are ill educated; they do not
think ahead."

Filgard remarked gently that that statement came across as arrogant;
and, he said, in the past it was politically incorrect, although no
longer.  He grinned, "Of course, neither of those remarks is going to
influence you at all."

He stopped and thought for a moment.  "But," he said, "the statement
may not help you.  That should concern you."

Filgard went on, "It is true, most people do not think far ahead.  But
the reason may well have nothing to do with education or with native
intelligence.  That idea may lead you down the wrong path."

"What do you mean, the wrong path?"  asked Tull.

"Suppose the world is uncertain," said Filgard.  "For the most part,
then, an individual should not look too far ahead.  It is not good for
them to.  It is a waste of energy.  I mean energy in the literal
sense, the calories you burn.  Historically, most people got these
joules from foraging or hunting, mostly from foraging but part from
hunting."

"But why do I care about anthropology?"

"Well, you are teaching students or administering a university," said
Filgard.  "That means you are dealing with people.  You want to
succeed, don't you?"  He never did explain the exact connection;
Filgard just assumed that Tull would understand.

"Returning to my point," said Filgard, "a group needs some few to plan
ahead.  After all, you may survive the next year."

He did not bother to remind Tull that his previous comment on the
subject had been that is it is wasteful for most people to look far
ahead.  Tull had nearly forgot that.

Filgard went on, "No one needs to be an evolutionary psychologist to
believe this; you can observe that even nowadays, groups do better
that successfully plan ahead."

Tull said he was not sure what Filgard meant by the phrase
'evolutionary psychology.'

It was a digression from the main topic, but Filgard explained.  "That
is saying that you can understand an individual human or other
animal's behavior by considering evolutionary history.  It does not
always work; and you have to avoid telling 'just so' stories.  But
when done right, the discipline is helpful.

"A turtle has a shell.  That is a physical phenotype.  A turtle grows
its shell because of its genes; a particular individual's shell is
influenced by that turtle's environment.

"The behavior of a turtle is to pull its head and feet into the shell
when threatened.  This often works.  There is no way an attacker of
about the same size can get at it readily, so after pecking or
scratching a bit, the attacker almost always gives up.  The
probabilities favor the genes carried by the turtle.

"So, with a recipe that is more successful in replicating, we are more
likely to get another turtle that pulls in its head and feet when
threatened.  That's its psychological or behavioral phenotype.  Both
are necessary, the shell and pulling in its head and feet.

"Of course, a little attacker, a bacterium, is not hindered by a
shell; a turtle can get sick.  It needs a different defense against
the bacterium, an immune system.  And a bigger attacker can defeat the
shell.

"For example, a big bird can lift the whole turtle and drop it on
stones from a height.  The drop breaks the shell and the bird can eat
the remains.  But big birds are rare.

"Evolutionary psychologists remember that most of the time, that is to
say, through most of history, not just the short written portion of
it, humans foraged and hunted because they had not yet invented
agriculture.  Agriculture did not get invented until ten or fifteen
millennia ago.  None had invented writing, either.  Writing was
invented even more recently."

Tull was a bit startled.  His eyes may have glazed just a smidgen.  He
did not think the invention of writing as 'recent.'

Filgard went on, oblivious.  "Throughout most of the time during which
humans became human, they lived in pre-agricultural bands.

"The qualitative argument is that foraging and hunting are erratic; no
one knows what will be found or not found next.

"That is to say, it hurts most people to think far ahead; they cannot
do anything.  Also, presumably, that is why most people are more
optimistic than conditions warrant.  (That is what research in the
late 20th century suggested.)  Optimism helps."

Filgard took a breath.  "But at the same time, it is useful for a
group to have a few who think ahead and who can remember a long time
back.  Sometimes, for example, you have several years of rain followed
by several years of drought.  A short time horizon does not help.  If
you are heading into a new drought, someone in your band had better
remember back to the previous one.  They need to remember and tell you
what happened and what was done.  That is the 'grandmother' theory.
That is the notion that a band should have a few old people who can
remember the past; these are mostly grandmothers.  In nature, men tend
to die younger.

"The issue has different parts.  Each part needs its own evidence."
Filgard looked at the man.  "I would like you to tell me the answers.
I am not going to look into them myself.  I am not skilled in the
subject and I have other things that occupy me.  But I am interested."

Tull nodded, but it was not clear whether he nodded because that was
appropriate in the circumstances or whether he agreed to undertake the
investigation.

Filgard paused, then said, "The questions are straightforward.  The
first is whether pre-agricultural band life was uncertain.

"As a practical matter, I think some things were more certain during
ice ages than now.  Weather is a good example.  During an ice age, the
temperature gradient between the edge of the ice and the equator was
tighter and sharper than it is now.  My hunch is that storms came more
regularly then."

Tull looked puzzled.  He did not follow.  Filgard explained.  "The
edge of the ice, which was at roughly the freezing temperature of
water was closer to the equator, which received more or less the same
sunlight as it does now.  Clearly, the equator is cooled by cold
winds, but still, I think the temperature gradient was higher.  That
would be something to discover."

Tull said, "You mean, I have to study paleoclimatology?"  "Yes, of
course," said Filgard, "that is what you need for a follow up.  You
can see why I don't have the time."

Filgard stopped again.  "But to return to the subject, a digression,
regular storms are why, I think, the week was invented.  That is, in
addition to the movements of the moon and to women's menstrual cycles
which I suspect are more significant.  But my hypothesis is that
storms came regularly twice a week during the ice ages.  There are
only four weeks in a month because you can see full, no, and quarter
moons easily and because everyone, even non-speaking babies, can count
to four.  A week itself has roughly twice that number in it.  I
suspect it has seven days because that is the number of wanderers, if
you include the sun and the moon, readily visible to the naked eye in
the sky.  You can name the days of the week; as far as I know, weeks
are not named.

"Back to gathering and hunting: I suspect that people would sometimes
fail to find and harvest edible plants and animals.  A band would not
find tubers or kill enough rabbits for twelve people.  We know people
had to fail sometimes.  They had little storage and few alternatives.
I don't know the numbers, though, excepting that that part of life
would be uncertain.

"On the other hand, people ate lots of different plants.  Maybe their
lives were more certain than we think.  Paleolithic gatherers and
hunters grew taller than their agricultural successors.  That meant
they ate more.  But their numbers hardly grew.

"The lack of population growth suggests that the salient portions of
pre-agricultural band life were 'nasty, brutish, and short.'  Or maybe
just short.  In any event, imagine it was uncertain.  Were people in
such a band better off when most did not spend their time and energy
concerned with whatever is beyond uncertainty?

"And if so, were people in such a band better off when a few did think
ahead and remember behind?"  The words were 'ahead' and 'behind';
Filgard briefly recalled that in some cultures, the unknown future was
behind and invisible, and the known past was ahead.  But English put
the past behind; it seemed natural.  Filgard decided the question was
an irrelevancy he should ignore.

He went on, "Also, if members of a band were better off with a few
long term thinkers, were such people helped by a powerful reason to
be?  That is to say, did more bands survive when each provided a
powerful belief that could carry people emotionally through bad times?
I mean, for example, when members of a band found food, but not quite
enough.

"Actually, I am hypothesizing an impact on individual genes from
reproduction that depends on differences in the behavior of groups.
This impact is much weaker than the impact from changes in the
behavior of individuals who carry the genes.  We know that.  But is
the impact so much weaker that it is irrelevant?

"That is one set of questions.  They are easy to ask and may well have
been answered, but I don't know.  That is a disadvantage of being too
specialized.

"As for another set of questions: if people were significantly
different from one another, a few thinking ahead and remembering the
past, and others not, why were they different?  Maybe genes don't have
anything to do with it."

Tull said, "You are talking about the nature -- nurture controversy."

"Yes," said Filgard.  "Were the temperaments caused, at least in part,
by genes?  We know that children look somewhat like their parents, and
look somewhat different.  Were their temperaments similar?"

"What do you mean, temperaments?"  asked Tull.

"In this case, whether people have a preference for looking far ahead
into an uncertain future, or not.  Like your comment on students, I am
saying that only a small portion of the population had a preference
for looking far ahead into an uncertain future."

"I don't follow you," said Tull.  Filgard sighed.  "You said that
students do not think ahead.  I am inventing a testable theory as to
why."  Filgard no longer thought Tull was a professor.

"Obviously, the genes that individuals carry are more likely to be
replicated when the entities carrying them are more successful in
reproduction.  The question is not whether those data packets were
replicated more when they changed in a way that enabled those who
carried them to survive and transmit them more than otherwise.  They
must have been.  The question, actually, it is a subordinate question,
is what caused that characteristic difference in the first place?"

"You are speaking of genes as data packets, right?"  asked Tull.
"Well, for this analysis," responded Filgard, "what else are they?"
He returned to what he considered a more important topic.

"An alternative is to ask whether people are different because they
were brought up differently?  And if so, were the customs for bringing
up kids well established.  Did that establish more or less permanent
proportions among types?

"Then, we must ask whether, over the long run, it is true that bands
with past and future seers did better than those without?  I suspect
such bands did better, but that is a question.  In any case,
upbringing provides a non-genetic way to transmit information from
generation to generation.

"I don't know what the answers are.  You can say it is a mixture of
causes; that is the way I am inclined.  But then the question becomes
under which circumstances, what proportion of which cause?

"Or is there some other reason that neither you nor I have thought
of?"

Filgard was a bit irritated.  He no longer expected Tull to study the
problem and report back, even though he had started it all.  He had
talked about people who did not think ahead.

On the other side, Tull had been trying to make small talk, which he
considered harmless.  He had not expected scholarship.  In his own
mind, he likened Filgard's remarks to an harangue.  He decided that
Filgard was a stuffed shirt with an electronic speaker behind it,
repeating a recording.  He was best kept away from the faculty lounge.
Tull knew he could not keep Filgard away, since he was part of the
faculty; but he could be avoided.

Chapter 18
**********

Vallen's company owned a division, a smaller company, COMPLEX TOOLS,
INC.  Among other items, it manufactured expensive, complex machines.
There were few customers for them.  However, it owned the rights to
enough different ones that all told, the division made a good income,
even though it built few of each.  Even better, the division made a
good profit.

Vallen was put in charge of CT. It was a move away from the widely
sold, low margin specialized car parts he had worked with previously.
The new division manufactured high margin products which it sold
narrowly.  Vallen would not be inspecting the same factories; but he
would be visiting the same cities.  He did not expect to be offered
any bribes on his new job.  There was no reason.  But he had made
enough previously.  And this was a promotion, a good promotion.  He
liked it.  Vallen expected a promotion and he was pleased with the one
he got.  It was as good as he had hoped.  And it meant he could leave
the world of low margin gadgets.  That suited him.

COMPLEX TOOLS, INC., with money from ADVANCEMENT INC., paid for
permission to copy various machines from ADVANCEMENT INC.  That made
sense to the accountants.  ADVANCEMENT INC. had previously purchased
licenses to manufacture copies using spray-droplet machines.  The
machines were new to COMPLEX TOOLS, INC. but not so different from
what they had traditionally built, except they were made by spraying
droplets.  The droplet-made copies worked as well those traditionally
built and cost less to manufacture.  CT sold the machines for less but
Vallen increased his profits slightly.

All would have been well, except that Vallen's company increased his
expected tenure to five years.  The goal was to stretch his time
horizon a bit further.  The change succeeded.  Vallen started to look
four and five years ahead instead of two or three.  He thought to
himself, 'If I had expected to leave within three years, as had been
traditional, I would have enjoyed the short-term profits.  I would
have left my successor to clean up.  But five years?'

What would ADVANCEMENT INC. do?  Or, more significantly, what would
its backers do?  Vallen decided that after a honeymoon, a metaphor
that he thought described his present relations happily, ADVANCEMENT
INC. would undertake negotiations to squeeze his profits.  They would
threaten to sell their licenses to another company.  If worse came to
worst, they would let it be known that an extra-legal company might
gain control of the instructions used by the spray-droplet machines.
Were that to happen, ADVANCEMENT INC. would lose.  They would not
receive any license income at all.  But its backers had less to lose
personally than Vallen.  So they had a more powerful negotiating
position.  They were not stupid, so they would not themselves lose too
much; they would not cause Vallen to lose too much.  But they would
squeeze CT's profits.  Vallen would not lose a lot; but he would lose
a little.  He was against losing.

Vallen decided that he had to change the nature of the game.  'When
you cannot buy an apple at a decent price, upset the applecart,' that
is what he told himself.  It was a long sentence.  Maybe he should
think to himself, 'no apple, no applecart.'

Vallen had to communicate what he meant.  He was not known enough for
ruthlessness, not like the backers of ADVANCEMENT INC.

He did not mind hurting people he did not know, even when he knew that
person's name; he figured that went on all the time.  That is what
disillusionment meant.  Vallen did not dare hurt anyone in ADVANCEMENT
INC. or any of its backers.  That was too dangerous.  So he had to
look elsewhere.

He came upon Filgard Meldon, whom he thought was important to the
profits of ADVANCEMENT INC. -- Vallen had a 'great hero' view of
science and engineering.

Moreover, Vallen had knowledge of his own self: he personally
succeeded because he prevented the wrong people from learning about
the bribes he received.  He figured that everyone who succeeds must be
like him.  Consequently, he thought of Filgard as critical to
Filgard's recorder.  He did not know that it is useless to murder an
engineer after he has made a development unless that engineer has not
communicated his designs, or unless that person is not an engineer,
even if so called, but is important because he is an inspiring leader.

Five years previously he would not have known how to begin.  Now he
knew people who knew people who knew people ... and he knew about
cutouts and how to dodge contemporary investigators.  And he had the
money.  He would only go for the best and not ask questions.  From his
point of view, the process would be clean, very clean.  He was not
going to sleep badly at night.

Meanwhile, Vallen found he was carving an hour out of every day for
his hobby, which was -- he was amused at the word -- carving.  He
found that carving helped him do other work, his paid work, more
quickly.  So he took time from that as well has from his sleep.
Moreover, when he carved, even if only for an hour or so, he did not
need as much sleep as before, although he always felt tired.  Meetings
with other people, persuading them, that took as long as before.

While he was getting ready to hire someone to murder Filgard, Vallen
carved soldiers.  They were full bodies, not just heads.  They mostly
carried spears.  Although the rest of a carving came from one block,
he made the spears separately.  They were straight, regular, and hard
to create.

When he walked on the shore, every properly sized piece of drift wood
looked as if it contained the shape of a miniature Medieval warrior.
Vallen understood that his mood could not last, but he accepted it
while it lasted.

He carved a bunch figures, some standing with their spears upright,
looking resolute, some fallen and looking anguished.  A few rode
horses.

Vallen was becoming better.  Even though they were small, smaller than
the palm of his hand, as small as two fingers, his faces carried
expression.  Each carving looked like a different person.  Fortunately
for Vallen, they were not anyone he knew.  He could show them
publicly.

Chapter 19
**********

The only name by which Vallen knew the assassin was 'Gerald.'  Vallen
doubted the name was given to the man at birth; indeed, he was
confident that it was adopted for the job.  But it fit the fellow
fine, at least from the conversations.  Vallen never saw him or a
picture of him.  He suspected, but did not know, that the fellow was
tall, but not too tall, handsome, but not too handsome; that in a
crowd he was mostly invisible.

Gerald contacted a police officer, not one near Filgard physically,
but corrupt and near him electronically.  The officer had easy access
to databases and made considerable extra money selling information.
Like Vallen, the officer did not dare spend the extra money locally.
But it made for a nice nest egg and for livelier than usual vacations
in distant and unwatched places.

The cop told Gerald that Filgard Meldon owned a convenience store and
give him both Filgard's home and store addresses.  That Gerald already
knew; the cop told him more, information that was not public.  He knew
that Gerald was a professional assassin and figured that Filgard must
have borrowed and not paid the money back.  He carefully did not say
anything unnecessary to Gerald and did not pay any attention to
Filgard's home town.

Gerald made the same assumption about Filgard Meldon as the cop.
However, he figured that Filgard had not simply borrowed a little bit
but a huge amount of money.  That was why he was asked to 'take care'
of the man in a public way.  The murder was intended as a warning to
others as well as a pay back.  If Gerald had felt conscience, he would
have felt virtue.

The convenience store looked to Gerald more like a general store.  It
sold convenient items.  But it carried more.  Not only did it display
all the things people ran out of, it displayed a good number of things
people should need and sometimes did.  It carried tricycles for
adults.  They came with big baskets so people could shop without
having to drive cars.  The tricycles had rigid plastic windshields and
roofs; they could be ridden in the rain.  And the store had local
food.

Vegetables caught Gerald's eyes and mouth.  Because they grew close by
and were transported shorter distances, they cost less.  Although
farmers still used some chemicals in their growth, explanations said
they used less.  The explanations were posted by the stands and their
existence meant that local deliveries and foods with fewer chemicals
were new and not well known.

The new plants had different genes than the old.  The old days'
concern over amount was replaced by a modern concern over shipping
costs.  Evidently, local farmers brought in as much profit by
producing with the new seeds, using fewer chemicals, and making local
deliveries as they did with the old seeds, using more chemicals, and
depending on others to make distant deliveries.  Gerald noted that
none of the explanations stated whether the newer, more predominant
genes came from breeding or from genetic engineering, or who funded
those costs.  None said whether the seeds produced a generation whose
own seeds were fertile or sterile.

The latter lack suggested to Gerald that second generation seeds were
sterile and that private companies funded their initial costs by
charging a high average price for each packet.  Sterility saved them
from competition with farmers and themselves, but not from other smart
companies.  For that they had to depend on government enforced price
restrictions, primarily obtained through patents.  There were too many
companies for oligopolistic price-fixing to succeed.

Since any increase in seed price was less than the cost of chemicals
not used, few farmers complained.  And since the locally grown produce
was cheaper than the old, few customers noticed.

The plants often did not look as good as distant imports, but they
tasted better, as Gerald verified.  It was summer.  He liked the
carrots and cucumbers.  He wondered what happened out of season.

Gerald found a hiding place that was a long ways from Filgard's
church.  He was not visible to others, although he could look out.
Even better, he could readily escape in any of three directions.  On
the morning of the shooting, there was no wind.

Gerald shot the store owner when he was standing outside his church.
The spent bullet penetrated a little distance into the wall.  Neither
it nor dislodged chips killed others.  From Gerald's point of view,
the killing was clean.  The head shot burst Filgard's skull and
splattered blood all over his wife.

Gerald left immediately.  He never learned that Filgard the store
owner was the wrong man.

The murder stunned the engineer.  Why had his namesake been shot?  It
was very obviously a professional assassination.  It was not a single
car accident or anything like that.

On thorough investigation, the accountants and other investigators
found nothing wrong.  The store owner had not borrowed money from
suspicious sources; he did not womanize.  He was not addicted, except
perhaps to his work.  The store was not owned by anyone else.  In
retrospect, the victim looked as competent and respectable as he did
during his life.

Even a local crook said that the store owner had not been in contact.
"We never take care of our customers in such a public way," he said.
The reporter never identified the crook and the engineer wondered how
the reporter knew of him.  He did not think the reporter had made up
the story; the reporter had a good reputation.

The police rapidly came to the conclusion that the murder was a
mistake.  There were several other store owners who would make more
likely targets, although none for what was very clearly a professional
and expensive shooting.  They hadn't a clue who did it.

Also, the police discovered that another person of the same unusual
name lived in the same town.  He was an engineer.  He had invented
something that would cut the costs of trucks and paper, although not
by much.  As far as they were concerned that was fine.  They could not
figure out why anyone would care to murder the engineer, either.

Everything was reported publicly; no one locally had any reason to
hinder the action.  Fortunately for Filgard, at least he thought it
fortunate, the engineer was only mentioned as 'a namesake, a distant
relative' and not otherwise identified.

Vallen did not learn much of the murder.  He only saw the note that 'a
convenience store owner had been shot.'  The name was unusual, the
report said -- Vallen suspected that is why the story traveled as far
is it did -- although a distant relative in the same town enjoyed or
suffered the same name.

Vallen decided not to do anything more.  Gerald had shot the wrong
man.  Vallen was going to lose in his negotiations with ADVANCEMENT
INC., but not much; they were too smart for that.

It was safer to lose.  As far as Vallen was concerned, he had spent a
lot of money, he had hired a professional, and the professional had
goofed.  That was the breaks.  Vallen did not dare increase his
exposure, as would happen with a second murder of a fellow of the same
name in the same city.

It was not like he lived in a third world country where he could bribe
cops and politicians and other senior people.  He lived in a country
where the presumption was that strangers behaved legally as well as
morally, that the two were never separated.  Vallen could only bribe
people he knew; and there were many he could not.  There were too many
vigorous reporters, honest cops, and sharp prosecutors.

As it happened, Vallen lost almost nothing at all.  Even though Gerald
had murdered the wrong man, Vallen felt like a stone age warrior after
his first kill.  He exuded confidence, not dramatically, but
distinctly enough for the subtle.  His counterparts noticed.  They did
not know why he behaved stronger than before, but in the negotiations
they did not push him as hard as they had planned.

Chapter 20
**********

Vallen wanted to discourage his son, Jeffrey, from becoming too
idealistic.  He knew he could not bring up the subject directly.
Instead, at dinner, in the house, not a barbecue, he spoke to the
whole table, his son, his daughter, and his wife.

He usually did not do this -- they seldom had dinner together -- so
they knew he was up to something he considered important.

"Go back to the latter part of the 20th century," Vallen said, "that
is the period when the previous major petroleum producer, the
contiguous United States, started to produce less liquid fossil fuel
each year but during which planetary production increased."

"That was a long time ago," said his son, Jeffrey.

"Yes, but that is when the issue first became critical; and when
practical solutions became possible."

"What issue?"  asked his daughter, Janice, who was just coming around
to paying attention.

"Providing large amounts of convenient and available energy from
alternatives, at a reasonable price," said Vallen.

"You don't think practical alternatives were available earlier?"  His
son was curious.

"No," said Vallen.  "Otherwise, they would have been adopted
dramatically.  By 'dramatically,' I mean that within a generation more
than a fifth of energy would come from alternatives.  That did not
happen.

"Earlier, the alternative solutions offered were either not known or
were too expensive.  I suspect the latter; they did not fit the
pricing scheme, the businesses of the era."

"What do you mean, the alternatives did not fit the businesses of the
era?"

"Prices ignored total cost.  They did not include the cost of carbon
dioxide sequestration for fossil fuel or the cost of radioactive waste
disposal for uranium."

"Why was that?"  asked his son.

"No one thought of it; well, they thought of radioactive waste
disposal, and spent decades studying the problem.  They did not
actually do anything.  As far as I can see, the best places were put
out of bounds politically and a politically acceptable site was not so
good geologically.  Maybe it was unacceptable politically, too.  I
don't know for sure.  It is just that no one did anything for a very
long time; and no one powerful thought of charging for carbon dioxide
sequestration, either."

Vallen was slightly angry.  He or they could be hurt, although he
hoped those hurt would be poor and distant.  He went on.  "People who
funded a one gigawatt coal, oil, gas, or uranium electric generating
plant paid less than for a several square kilometer solar electric
generating plant.  Combined with their discount of the future -- our
present -- that cost meant no one built a one gigawatt solar electric
generating plant.

"The government subsidized building a few hundred megawatts.  I don't
know whether that was a good idea or not.  Mirrors and more
importantly, their supports, continued to cost a fortune."

Vallen remembered it all.  "Also, at least for part of that time, the
price of fossil fuels dropped significantly.  That is a practical
example of an inelastic demand curve; a small increase in supply meant
a large decrease in price."

His audience looked blank.  Vallen sighed and decided to skip the
notion.  It was not important anyhow, except as an explanation for one
element.  "The combination of partial pricing and low costs ended
short term incentives to long term solutions."

Vallen's daughter asked, "Did anything good happen?"

"Yes."  Vallen looked happier.  "In the last part of the 20th century,
during that generation, more people began to see that the planet was
finite not flat."

She was puzzled.  Vallen explained.  "I know, the words have been
commonplace for centuries.  Everyone knows the world is a ball.
Globes are globular."

His daughter smiled at the phrase.

"But in general," and now Vallen looked stern again, "people acted as
if the world were flat."  Janice frowned.

"In one way, this made sense.  Outside of a few spots historically,
Earth would take care of waste.  You could dump stuff into a river,
and by the time anyone drank the water, your waste was diluted or
destroyed."

His son was paying attention.  "That sounds like it makes sense in
more than one way.  Why bother to clean up when you don't have to?"

"That is true.  Then human impacts become large."  Janice nodded.  She
had never known a time when the human impacts were not large.

Vallen blinked his eyes.  "People still have a hard time understanding
impacts."

This caught his daughter's attention, as well as his son's.  They
thought people did understand by now.

"... The notions do not scale.  They do not enable you to conceive
billions of watts.  On average, you consume only a hundred watts.  You
can imagine using a few kilowatts, a few thousand joules per second.
You can imagine tens of kilowatts in heating."

Neither his son, his daughter, nor his wife imagined watts, but they
all nodded anyhow.  They had not the foggiest idea how big watts were,
but Jeffrey decided to find out.  It was just a matter of converting
two thousand kilocalories each day into watts.  He knew his food
provided him with two thousand 'big' Calories per day, two thousand
kilocalories per day.  He put the question aside.  Vallen went on.

"Unfortunately, no one is able to imagine all the energy actually
consumed.  That is millions of times larger."

The nods grew more vigorous, but as far as the others were concerned,
their father was still mouthing words that did not connect.

He said, "That is for energy use.  I did not consider the impact of
having so many barbecues around here.  I was not imagining the scaled
consequences."

The barbecue made more sense, but it was very much an irritation.
Vallen did not like the imposition.  Consequently, the rest, who had
to suffer Vallen, did not like it.

As a result, they paid less attention to Vallen's next words than he
intended.

"When I was young," Vallen said, "I was idealistic.  I believed we
could 'change the world.'  That was the phrase, 'change the world.'
Well, people did change the non-human world.

"But we did not change people.  Enough are still as greedy, as
short-sighted, as they ever were.

"That was my key lesson: there will be a few decent people.  I met
them.  You will meet them.  But there will not be enough of them."

He paused for a moment.  He was not going too far.  Even if his family
repeated what he said, even if he was being spied upon, which he
doubted, what he said would not matter.  Vallen was thinking about
outsiders, not what mattered to his family.  They thought he was
unburdening himself, not that he was trying to change his son.

"That is why I stopped being idealistic," Vallen said.  "There are not
and will not be enough people who act well.  Worse, when I was young
there were no organizations that I wanted to dedicate my life to, not
outside of business."

"What about the Melior Movement?"  Jennifer asked.

Vallen was surprised; the question was not related to what he was
trying to do, but he had to respond.  Moreover, he had not known his
wife knew about the Melior Movement.  "Well," he said, "the Melior
Movement is new; and its people are mostly into fleeing.  They cannot
handle a planet with a population that has a huge impact."

"What do you mean, a huge population?"  she asked.

"Earth," he said.  He had mentioned a huge impact, not a huge
population, but the Earth did have a huge population, although most
people did not have much of an impact.  He sighed internally and in
answer to an unspoken question, spoke again.  "Yes, yes," he waved his
hands.  "We could reduce the world's population slowly and gracefully.
In two hundred years, we could have a population of only a billion
relatively rich people.  They could have an impact that is not
harmful.

"Melior recommends this.  They are right.  It's right.

"The techniques for a gentle population reduction are well known.
They have been known for a long time: basically, to reduce population,
the poorest women need a better education and more opportunity.  To
keep a rich, well educated population from dropping too quickly,
mothers and fathers need tax-funded support.

"Technically, all this is doable.  But it is not the technical, it is
not the engineering, it is not the non-human parts of any of this that
are impossible.  It is that enough powerful people will not support
it.

"That is the key.  That is what I meant."  He looked at his son again.
He wanted to talk about idealism.  "You will meet good people, even
older people."  He laughed.  He remembered the statement, 'Don't trust
anyone over thirty.'  "There are millions of good people.  A few are
powerful.  But not enough."

Both Jeffrey and Janice had been paying attention to their parents.
Each, independently of the other, swore to find out more about the
Melior Movement after dinner.  Both had expected their father to say
the movement was impractical, which he did, but neither expected him
to say also, 'it's right.'

After eating, they both searched for and found information.  Reading
about the Melior Movement kept them busy the whole evening.  Jennifer
was so surprised, she checked on them.  She then reported to Vallen,
who said, "Well, your mention certainly got their attention."

Jeffrey latched onto the Melior Movement's preferred language, a
variation on a much older, but in linguistic terms recently invented,
language pronounced 'lozh-bahn' and spelled 'lojban.'  Very early on,
he learned that when spelling in roman characters, a 'j' was
pronounced like the 's' in 'pleasure', a 'zh'.  It was not like the
'd zh' sound at the beginning of his own name.  A 'c' was its
voiceless counterpart, pronounced like the 'sh' in 'hush'.  He had not
known about 'voiced' and 'voiceless' sounds before; then he learned
more.  He had no trouble remembering words or grammar.  To him, the
language was a complex toy.

Janice was more concerned the way people related directly, rather than
indirectly through language.  She talked with her father.  "Dad," she
said, "the Melior Movement's political ideas make sense.  As you said,
'There are many good people, but not enough are powerful.'  So you
have to set up a political system that presumes its rulers will be
evil.  That was the initial presumption in the United States; but the
institutions decayed."

Vallen nodded; his daughter was much more serious than he expected.
He said, "The initial presumption was also that those in government
would be better than the common people.  In many ways, it was a
government by the top quarter or fewer for the top."

"That may be true," Janice said, "I don't know.  But think about the
people the government was for.  Imagine you are in that group.  The
assumptions you make about family and friends don't help when you
design a government.  They did not then; they do not now.  You cannot
presume that strangers who want to rule you will be friendly and
honest."

"That is true," Vallen said, hugging her, to the surprise of both.  "I
rather wish the Melians would succeed, but I don't think they can.
Fleeing is their best bet, and I don't see how they can do it."

Chapter 21
**********

Filgard had only met his namesake once.  Still, he had met him.  He
was, after all, a distant relative and namesake.  Filgard decided to
go to the funeral.  For some reason, that seemed important.

At the door of the church, a slightly fat young man asked his name and
relationship.  The young man was beginning to indicate he did not
believe Filgard when a trim, slightly older man came up.  Filgard
remembered the face faintly.

"Professor Meldon is a distant relative; and he was named after the
same ancestor.  He is OK." Turning to Filgard, he said, "Detective
Derbler at your service."  At that point, Filgard remembered.  Derbler
had been in a class Filgard taught on 'Modern Forensic Technologies.'
It was one of the general classes he had to teach.  And with that
connection, he remembered the man's first name.  A double initial,
like him and his wife.  "David, thank you.  It is a sad day."  He was
starting to choke up at the thought of his wife; but he was not going
to say anything.  Let anyone who watched think he was upset that his
namesake died.  "I am going to sit in the back.  I feel I ought to be
here."

"Yes," said the detective.  "And sad news regarding your wife.  My
condolences."  He turned to the young man.  "The professor's wife
passed away recently.  Natural causes.  There was not anything to be
done, even though she was relatively speaking young.  It was not like
this death, about which," he turned to Filgard again, "we have no
clue."

They moved into the church.  "Not even the rifle marks on the bullet
-- determining that is old technology -- combined with the new
database of markings helped us.  The bullet was shot from a rifle that
was part of a shipment of accurate, large bore, single shot,
tournament rifles.  In the past six years, we have identified two
other rifles from the same shipment.  They shot bullets used in two
other assassinations, in widely different cities.  We never found
another trace of the rifles, other bullets, or the murderer.  The
other two victims probably deserved what they got.  They had a
reputation of being lowlifes.  I think our man here was an error."

He looked thoughtful for a moment.  "That is why we have prosecutors,
juries, and judges.  They prevent mistakes.  Mostly, of course, we
don't make them.  And no one cares if we misconvict someone poor.  But
a fellow like this; we would never have made the mistake.  And a rich
man, even if we are right, instead of losing his freedom or his life,
loses only his money and the time it takes to fight a decision in
court.  So it all works out.  Fortunately, I did not know this Filgard
Meldon.  As I said, I think his shooting was a mistake.  That is hard
on the people close to him, but not so hard on the rest of us.  Except
of course, we know that we live in a world with murderers who are as
imperfect as we."  Filgard nodded and sat down.

Filgard said to the detective, "The murderer was probably Sanguine,
like my wife, except that he didn't make music.  He was more like an
old-fashioned swordsman, a killer.  He liked his tools, practiced
shooting so he could hit from a long ways away.  He was a sniper.  He
could understand the rest, but he liked sniping.  Not that it is going
to do you any good finding him.  At least, you know his type.

"We also failed to protect and preserve him.  His wife was not
prepared.  On the other hand, this funeral may provide spiritual
sustenance, if nothing else."  Derbler raised an eyebrow.  "_Protect_,
_preserve_, _prepare_, and _provide_: that is what Melians say.  My
wife and I put up Eltis, their leader, when she comes by.  Fairta
invented the alliteration.  She also came up with _responsibility_,
_reliability_, _rigor_, _reason_, and _reality_, five 'Rs.'  None of
Fairta's sayings are good for finding individuals, but they are good
for government.  I myself am not planning to join the Melior Movement.
For one, I cannot learn another language at my age, but Eltis is not
bad."

The detective looked at Filgard, then walked down the side of the
sanctuary to a place near the front.  Filgard saw the detective turn
in his seat and look carefully at all the faces.  Filgard did not
expect the detective to discover anything.  He did not know it, but
the detective did not expect anything either.  But the job had to be
done.

After the service, the widow followed the coffin up the center aisle.
Distraught, she was held by a daughter or perhaps she held up the
daughter who also looked upset; it was not clear which.  The widow
noticed Filgard.  "Thank you for coming, Professor Meldon," she said.
"My Filgard would have liked your being here."  Then she walked on.
Filgard nearly broke down; and he did not know why.

Chapter 22
**********

Since Filgard had to cook more for himself after his wife died, he
paid more attention to his microwave oven.  That led him to notice
that the engineering laboratory possessed an old, unused, low
resolution screen that displayed three dimensionally.  It did not
require a watcher wear special glasses.  It was the same size as the
window on his microwave.

With a computer's help, Filgard could display in three dimensions the
shape of objects as shown by their various temperatures.  Red would be
warmer; blue colder.  That was the exact opposite of energies in a
visual spectrum, but Filgard knew the convention.  It came, he
thought, because a warming body first peaked in the lower frequencies,
the redder frequencies.  Also, in so far as ice had a color, it was
blue, not red.

Moreover, he knew that there had been a significant drop in the cost
and size of transmitters, receivers, and computers that were sensitive
and fast enough to determine temperature and to discover what foods
were inside a cold container.  He did not know when such a system had
become cheap enough, but it had.

He planned on displaying at a one millimeter resolution.  Nothing
would cost much.  Filgard remembered his youth and thought of a
millimeter as a twenty-fifth of an inch, although by now he was able
to imagine millimeters better than fractions of an inch.  Filgard knew
of computer chips that contained multiple circuits to emulate the
neural networks of a biological brain.  In addition to having his
students write necessary software, he could train the neural net to
understand where and how hot items were.  To do that, he would have to
insert known items into the microwave.  That could be done.  The
training needed to happen only once.  Then the information could be
copied to another computer.  Computers were not like individual people
or non-human animals, each of whom had to be taught from scratch.

As for the items with known shapes and measured temperatures -- 'Good
training,' Filgard thought.

You still could not put metal objects in the microwave.

Chapter 23
**********

Eltis was called by a Gilbert Daveson Hagborn.  She had never heard of
him before, but a traceback put him in the area she was considering
for an Earthly colony, so she let the call through.  She was curious.
What was going on?

Hagborn showed himself fully, even though most people preferred voice
only.  Only work collaborators and the like used visuals.  He was an
older man.  He looked prosperous.  Also, he was brown, not black, and
not white.  He did not say anything about his age, prosperity, or
ethnicity, but they may have been his messages.

He started by saying, "I was born here.  I grew up here.  Yet the
people who came before me still do not like me.

"I have heard about your starting a colony here."  Eltis jerked.  'How
had the news got that far?'  she wondered.  She had just begun to
explore the notion.

Hagborn continued speaking, as if he had not seen her surprise.
"Local people would like your high technology and your money.  We
could certainly use better methods from gathering water from the air."
He smiled and glinted white teeth.  "I would make a lot if you set up
an outpost here; not from you directly, but from the people around you
getting richer.  But on the whole, I am against your coming here.
There are two reasons."

That was why he called, Eltis decided.  To warn her away.  Why?

"First, you will just be another addition to an ethnic mix that is
pretty fierce, in a badly destroyed environment."

That was true; it was not the best location; but nobody was going to
fight to keep any part of it.  From Eltis' point of view, that was an
advantage.

"Since the location is not by the sea, you will be dependent on others
for imports and exports.  If you were by the sea, you could own ships
and control them.  In peacetime, navies are not much of a bother.  But
rail and road bridges ... anybody can blow them."

Eltis had not considered that.  She came from a region that had been
peaceful for a long time.

"Right now your sponsors are powerful.  But I can imagine them
becoming weak.  Your neighbors will certainly take as much from you as
possible for quite a while.  But they will not like you, they will
never like you, since you are outsiders who are here fundamentally as
a military force."

Eltis did not think of her movement as a military force; she would
have to think about someone else perceiving them that way.

"Second," Hagborn said, "as far as I can see, you want to set up
independent institutions.  It looks to me that you think that previous
habits and customs have failed, that the interests of the few
subordinate the rest.  And you think that the only way to institute
new ones is to provide new institutions."

That was true.  Eltis agreed.  That is why she had invented the Melior
Movement in the first place.

"Certainly, we are a place that needs new institutions.  No one in
their right minds would damage this part of the world as much as they
have -- not unless motivation drove them over that cliff.  Mining
water, pumping it from aquifers faster than they refill, that is
stupid; but that is what people have done.

"But we won't get new institutions, not here.  I can assure you that
from a long life of experience."  Hagborn grinned wryly.

"In so far as you follow the formal law, you won't be able to set up
anything independent.  That is forbidden.  That is not going to
change.

"As for the informal, which is how this place is actually run, you
can't depend on it.  At least, not for the generations you are
planning.

"You and your supporters will make sure initially that you are
powerful.  Your advantage will last a good decade or two; maybe even
longer.  But over generations, your actual power may well drop.  It is
possible that power will be gained by the formal government and its
formal law; that would screw you.  More likely, thugs will continue.
Either way, with less power, you will be sunk.

"As I said earlier, I would make a lot of money if you came.
Probably, everything would go fine for the rest of my life.  But that
is not the issue."

He stopped for a moment, saw that Eltis was nodding gently, and went
on.  "I have a question about language: I understand that only people
crazy enough to learn a new language would come here; that makes
sense.  Most people who are born here want to leave.  Only a few of us
want to stay, and I am not even sure I want to continue to be one of
them."  He waved his hand, and the implicit question, away.

"Anyhow," he went on, "I can see the advantage of forcing incomers to
learn with equal difficulty, regardless whether they first spoke
English or Chinese.  But why not adopt the local language?  It is
strange enough.  Not many people speak it any more, but you will have
to deal with those who do.  Why bring yet another language?"

He seemed to understand that Eltis could not answer him immediately
and said, "I have to go now."  Eltis nodded, and said, "I will think
about this."

After several days mulling over his call, Eltis decided he was right.
It would be a bad location.  She called and told him that.

Chapter 24
**********

Vallen recognized the name in a magazine story about 'Meldon's
Microwave.'  He decided to learn more about the man by manufacturing
and selling his device.  Besides, branching out would be useful.

His corporate superiors sought initiative.  They supplied people,
about whom they knew much, made non-human resources available, and
financed new activities that made sense.

They liked seeing a rising manager work more, too, although one of
their tests for success was that the person did not do 'too much.'
Vallen had to have a 'life of his own.'  That is why his carving was
accepted.

After learning more than enough from public sources, seeing recordings
of him and learning how he moved, Vallen contacted Filgard by letter.
Filgard knew all about the process and suggested Vallen fly out.
Filgard did not know that Vallen once paid for an attempt on his life.
Vallen remembered before his departure, but during the visit, never
thought of it.

Vallen intended to sell the 'Meldon Microwave' more widely than the
machines his division made.  It was a consumer good, not a
manufacturing tool.  But he did not plan to sell it with the same low
margin as he had previously sold consumer parts.  That meant that not
only had he to ensure that he controlled the legal mechanisms, patents
and copyrights, whereby the governments of lawful countries came to
his aid, but he had to make sure that few machines leaked into the
lower-priced extra legal trade.  He was not going to receive bribes
for permitting that kind of sale.  By this time, he knew how to
prevent production from matching demand; he could keep prices up.  At
least, he could prevent anyone with less than his skill from agreeing
to extra production.

Vallen did think that one of his subordinates was smart enough.  He
hoped the man -- it was another man -- would act illegally in a way
that only he would discover.  That action would make the man more
loyal and less likely to become a threat.

Part, but not all of Meldon's Microwave, could be made with spray
droplet technology.  The rest had to be manufactured and assembled the
old way.  By spreading the manufacturing around, Vallen could help
prevent currency imbalances yet at the same time ensure that no
government could gain control of the business.  A generation before,
everyone had learned about the danger of imbalances.  Vallen knew all
about organizing everything.

As for funding -- Filgard had done the first part of the development,
the part that required genius, but Vallen had to fund the part that
cost the most money.

Vallen explained to Filgard, "We are going to fund sociological
research.  I won't refer to it that way to anyone in corporate."  He
smiled, knowing he was winning Filgard over.  "They use the term
'marketing."'

Filgard smiled, too.  He thought of Vallen as both smart and friendly.

"We need," said Vallen, "to find how much people want when they say
something should be cooked less or more, that is to say, exactly how
much is meant by 'less' or 'more.'

"Some buyers will want to cook food a bit less, others a bit more,
than the computer suggests.  In practice, how much will that involve?"

Filgard looked puzzled.  "Don't you already know the answer?"  he
asked.  "Hasn't that been researched?"

"We know in general," said Vallen.  "We have known for a very long
time.  But this is a particular device with particular
characteristics.  We will start out with what is known and go from
there."

"I see," said Filgard.  "What kind of interface are you going to use?"

Vallen knew his people did not use the word 'interface' although it
defined the human connection.  But he ignored that.  He knew what
Filgard meant and he was talking to him.

"Well," Vallen said, "the machine should tell the user the type of
food or drink."  He paused for a second, as if he was just thinking
about the interface.  He had thought about it long before, but was now
trying to persuade.  He went on, "or maybe not.  Maybe we should not
tell the user.  Or maybe not yet.  The microwave may express the wrong
name.  That would not do us any good.  However, based on the chemicals
it can detect in addition to water, it can determine the time needed
for regular cooking."

Vallen saw massive change resulting from a microwave that determined
on its own the type of food or drink inside it.  People could try
foods they did not know about and would not have to look up their
cooking times.  Besides the standard items, people could and would try
odd ball things.

He figured a tinkerer -- a smart tinkerer like Filgard -- could add a
3-D temperature display.  But determining types of food -- that
required less genius and more effort.  It cost more.

In any event, the temperature display made computer determinations
understandable and acceptable.  Sometimes the microwave decided
wrongly.  Somehow, people were more likely to help when they could see
the shape of what was contained and its temperature rise.

Vallen stopped talking for a moment.  He had thought this through, but
did not want to give that impression.  "A customer should be able to
press any one of five buttons set vertically.  The middle button would
be labeled 'Done -- regular', the next higher button would be labeled
'Done -- more' and the highest button labeled 'Done -- most.'  Lower
buttons would be labeled 'Done -- less' and 'Done -- least."'

He paused again.  Filgard waited.  "In practice, the word 'done' is
not the right word to use for an action not yet done.  We will have to
think of another."

Filgard laughed, "How about 'cook'?"  Vallen laughed, too.  "Yes, you
are right!"

He went on, "The times for cooking cannot be determined or shown until
after the food is put into the microwave and its door closed.  Then
they should appear."

Vallen could see that it would be better to have the five buttons
arranged vertically rather than horizontally.  He wondered whether
anyone would think about arranging them horizontally.  He doubted
that.

Five would be a good number.  Three would not give enough appearance
of choice.  Five could be grasped easily by everyone.  Vallen
remembered references to an ancient study with a name something like
'Seven plus or minus two, the Magic Number.'  It was old.  Maybe,
even, it was from the time when sociology was the proper term, not
marketing.  He mentioned the study to Filgard, who knew about it.

The engineer said, "Decades have passed since I thought about it.  It
tells what we can do.  An engineer like me cannot keep in mind more
than seven or nine items.  I think a good physicist can keep more in
mind at once.  The universe does not follow human constraints.
Sometimes you need to think with more variables, sometimes not.

"A very good physicist translates from the large number that he can
keep in mind to the five, six, seven, eight, or nine items that his
regular readers can keep in mind."

Vallen wondered at the kind of mind that could keep even five physics
variables in mind, but he did not talk about that.  Instead, he said
"In any case, while we can design the microwave with seven buttons,
five are enough.  Rather than be seen as one vertical column, as
eleven buttons might be, the buttons will be seen as five distinct
entities.  At least they will if we design them right."

Vallen asked, "Do you think the microwave could use a 'Stop and Clear'
button, too?  On the one hand, it makes the interface more complicated
and more expensive.  On the other hand, it enables people to make
mistakes and correct them."  Filgard nodded.

"My hunch is the latter is more important.  A 'Stop and Clear' button
could go to the right of the column with five choices, be bigger and
more squarish."

Vallen wondered outloud.  "Should we provide an interface to an
electronic timer?  Yet more buttons!  They cost more!  Lower profits!
An electronic timer needs a 'Start' button at the bottom, as well as
the ten numbered buttons.  When you press a numbered button, the times
on the Cook buttons should fade, but not disappear entirely.  When
someone makes a mistake, press the 'Stop and Clear' button.

"As a practical matter, we know already that most people would not
care for a timer; but the 'early adopters' might think it important.
I am going ahead of the research, but I suspect our first model has
got to have one."

Vallen had not thought of it, nor had Filgard, but the 'marketeers,'
as Filgard persisted in calling them, decided that when a 'Cook'
button was pressed, the times on the others should get dimmer.  The
pressed button showed the time remaining, counting down.

After the first success -- and it was definitely a success, buyers
liked looking at the three-dimensional images slowly changing color --
Vallen organized improvements in the interface.

The first model did not name the foods.  Determinations used by the
computer enabled it to calculate cooking times, but they involved a
nomenclature that did not match common language.  For example, Chinese
food consisted of smaller blocks of substance, such as a vegetable, in
another, such as rice.  From the machine's point of view, a European
stew was nearly the same, smaller blocks of substance in another, with
everything mostly made up of water.

But the second model did include a display to list the contents.  The
receivers were sensitive enough to provide data to the computer.
Knowing the contents of sauces, it could decide whether a cube of
chicken within something else was Chinese or other.  That meant that
most of the time, the list would fit human expectations.  The
microwave did not go wrong, at least, not regularly.

The second model was more expensive to construct than the first,
simpler model.  For one, the three-dimensional interface that Vallen
purchased had too low a resolution for writing.  It was not that
different from the one that Filgard adopted initially.  It was cheap.
The new design incorporated a second screen.  The two together were
cheaper than a single, completely high resolution, three dimensional
display.  The second screen was not visibly different from the first.
Most buyers did not realize there were two different ones.  The second
screen was not three-dimensional; but it possessed a resolution twelve
times higher than the first.

Lines and arrows on and in the three-dimensional screen pointed to the
different parts and led to the two-dimensional screen at its right.
Part of the design had to make sure that none of the lines crossed
each other, that the first line started at the top, the second a
little ways down on the right, and so on, that the key item got a
border put around it, and around its listing, and that there were no
more than five or seven lines (and items) total.

The second screen took up some space from the first, but few people
put anything by that wall; and since the first screen displayed three
dimensionally, they could look around the second screen.  That
required a somewhat different three dimensional screen, slightly less
wide, which saved money, with a wider viewing angle, which cost more.

Even though Vallen had to pay programmers initially, the incremental
cost of the software part of the action was zero; but the extra
hardware cost every time.  He made considerable extra profit selling
the 'more advanced' model.  Eventually, he thought, they would market
five different designs for Meldon's Microwave.

Chapter 25
**********

Vallen was cheered; Filgard depressed.  He was not depressed by his
microwave oven.  That was working out well.  That is why Vallen felt
good.

But Filgard had spoken again to George Trumman about the recorder.
Developing it bit by bit was still Filgard's main project.  He
re-designed it to fold, both so it would take up less space when
traveling and so it could itself be recorded, not that anyone could
reproduce it yet.  That would take atom-by-atom duplication.  But
Filgard was confident that Peter would build such a replicator.

Peter spoke of making an atom-by-atom duplicator as the 'other half'
of their project.  He had forgot about, or did not talk about, spray
droplet devices.  They did not assemble atom-by-atom but with much
larger clusters.  Spray-droplet machines could not replicate computers
or food.

Peter pointed out that not only did people want material wealth, but
that the recorder and the assembler together could save the world.  He
was very nearly ready to transition to his own project.  Filgard had
decided long ago that Peter was smarter and more likely to solve the
practical engineering problems than he himself was.  Peter could pull
together and manage a team, too.

Meanwhile, Filgard and the others kept redoing the recorder.  It
became simpler for others to use.  Essentially, all you had to do was
plug it in and insert what you wanted recorded.  The coolers all
became solid state.  It stopped breaking entirely.  Besides the cutter
and location mechanism, the only moving part came in the blower that
moved helium around the object so it cooled more quickly than by
radiating into the solid state coolers.  You did have to fill up the
helium canister every so often.

Filgard remembered Peter pointing out that 'machines for mining,
refining, and granulation' could be manufactured cheaply by spray
droplet machines, even with their relatively low resolution.  Not all
their parts could be made, but all their big parts could be.

Unfortunately for Filgard's hopes, Trumman said their manufacture
would be forbidden.  "The companies that make them do not want to cut
their profits.  And their costs are not a huge portion of total costs.
Moreover, the companies that use them sell enough to law abiding
states that they would suffer from boycotts.  So extra-legal
production is not going to work.  No one is going to build solar
heaters either, not in this generation.  They would compete with the
coal-fired heaters that are used to make steam in electric power
plants."

Trumman said, "Besides other sources of income, we have investments in
coal mines.  We are not going to kill that canary.  A portion of our
coal is burnt to generate electricity.  We do not want competition,
which an inexpensive solar heater would be.  It could store heat in
liquid salt, so electricity could be generated at night or during a
storm, not just during a sunny day.

"Also, we have investments in refineries to convert solid coal to
liquid.  Liquid fuel is convenient.  It is used by cars, trucks, and
airplanes.

"All the coal goes through big plants, whether it be for generating
electricity or for conversion to liquid.  That pushes away the
environmentalists and global warming people because the big plants can
sequester at least some of the carbon dioxide."

"What about burning the liquid in transportation; none of that fossil
carbon is sequestered," Filgard said.  "Well, we can't do it all," was
the response.  "As for what we can do, we get a subsidy for putting it
into storage that is not likely to leak for at least a century.

"I know, I know," Trumman raised his hands, palm forward, "you are
going to tell me that a century is a short time by geological
standards.  It is.  But we are not going to be around in a century.
The people then can worry about it.  Maybe by then they will have used
up the coal and will produce solar heaters instead.  Then they can
take carbon dioxide out of the air, obtain hydrogen from ocean water,
and produce fuel."

Chapter 26
**********

Unlike many, Peter had no trouble at all writing his dissertation and
completing graduate school.  He was smart and fully committed to his
work.  Doubtless, the latter was most important, that he worked all
the time.  He learned information that most considered boring but was
useful to have in his head.  Technically, he was helped by being
smart.  Socially, he was helped by being connected to Filgard.

After finishing graduate school, Peter was hired by another
university, no more than a few hours drive from Filgard's.  It had
been established as a technical institution by people who understood
what was necessary.

Peter's new project was to create tools to put together molecules and
atoms one by one, very quickly, and in parallel.  Unlike the vast
majority of new people, the university administrators provided him
with the funds to hire a team; they wanted and expected him to
complete the final steps in what was a generations' long desire.

His and their intent was to create a practical nano-assembler that
could work with more substances and be faster than the humans,
animals, plants, or bacteria which already created grand patterns.

When he was hired, Peter bought a house in a small town not too far
away from the university.  He was very proud of it and enjoyed
puttering about.  The town had once been agricultural and still was, a
little.  It was on the edge of, but not in a beautiful and popular
area.  With the collapse in remote land and prices that followed a
permanent increase in the cost of energy, Peter came to afford it.
Retired people moved there, too.

To many people's surprise, but not to the university administrators
who funded him and not to Peter, he and his team succeeded fairly
quickly.  They built a successful nano-assembler in just over three
years.  Of course, others had been working on the project for decades.

Peter modestly quoted John of Salisbury, who in the European Middle
Ages wrote that "Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like
dwarfs on the shoulders of giants ..."

Using the same design, Peter's team built another nano-assembler.  It,
too, could assemble devices like itself as well as other devices.
Using Filgard's recorder, they copied the first working assembler,
destroying it in the process.  They found that the design code from
that recording was identical to the one they had invented for the
assembler.  Using that design code, they manufactured more assemblers,
which in turn could manufacture assemblers like itself.

Filgard's machine could record the positions and types of atoms on
anything that could be cooled enough.  The assembler could construct
it.  With the recorder on the one hand, and the assembler on the
other, anything that could be frozen could be duplicated.

Peter's team copied, destroyed, and then made two working copies of
Meldon's Microwave.

Peter felt proud, although that was not visible to others.  Meldon's
Recorder could produce data remembering everything humans had built,
including old paintings, old and new cosmetics, and modern computer
chips.  So long as the first instance could be frozen, anything could
be manufactured in unlimited amounts with either spray-droplet
machines or nano-assemblers or both.

A human could not be duplicated, nor could cats and dogs, nor cows nor
horses.  They would freeze if they were cooled.  Nothing living could
be duplicated so long as it depended on warmth.  But food could be
cooled.  It could be frozen to near absolute zero and then recorded.
An assembler could then manufacture and heat a duplicate.

And, of course, a design could be stored or transmitted independently.

After his success, Peter considered getting married.  He had not yet
-- he had spent most of his time working; he still did.  But now he
had completed what he considered the major effort of his life.  Also,
he finally noticed that he was getting older.  As for a potential
wife: he could talk with Eltis Akthorn.  She was smart enough and
close enough in temperament.

His main problem, as he saw it, was that he could never remember the
conventions for courtship.  As a practical matter, he considered it
enough to be able to talk and get along.  But that was, he decided, a
definition for friendship, too.  It never occurred to him to act
romantic.  He did not think he could act.  In any case, if Eltis and
he got married, she would have to travel.  That would not be bad; he
would get a chance to work.  Already, he invited her to visit him in
her travels; she came.

Peter talked of his nano-assembler as producing an economic shift, but
not a new shift.  It was, he said to one journalist, Fred Dingle, "an
extension of an old shift."

Peter said, "Learning to read and write was never cheap."  He went on,
"Kids spend years learning.  But after you have gained the skill,
using that skill is easy.  Military systems and law are the same."

Peter did not say anything about text-to-speech and speech-to-text
devices.  They were making it less and less useful to learn to read.
But speech, even fast speech, was only one dimensional.  It only
became two or three dimensional when people remembered.

That could not be counted on.  That is to say, advertisers could not
count on people remembering.  Designers spoke of 'their targets',
using the same language as hunters.  Targets that are hit do not
remember well, that was the underlying presumption.  Besides, no one
remembered the one dimensional advertisements of radio.

In any event, children lacked the power of those who taught them; so
they still learned to read.

Dingle wanted to know how military systems and law are the same as
learning to read and write.  He did not make the connection
immediately.  Or perhaps he did, but wanted to quote Peter.

"They are all high initial, low incremental cost systems.  As a child,
or as a late-learning adult, you have to invest time and effort to
learn to read and write.  Then it costs little to keep up."

Dingle nodded.  His audience could follow that.

"The same with a military," said Peter.  "To create a strong army is
initially expensive.  You have to have an appropriate culture.  And
even if you do, it's still expensive to start right.  We are talking
about individuals and about society.  Individuals have to invest in
learning how to be a soldier just as they have to invest in learning
to read and write.  During that time, others must support them,
whether it be parents or government.

"After they lost a war, it took the Spartans several generations to go
from being weak to being powerful."

That was good, too.  Dingle figured his audience had heard of the
Spartans, but did not know much.  They would not have known that the
Spartans were once weak, although that made sense.

Peter continued, "While they were building up their army, the Spartans
had to pay on a promise.  That went on for several generations.  The
Spartans paid hugely.  Then they gained power.  They could win against
their neighbors.  They could conquer."

He stopped and grinned fiercely.  "When you think, it is horrible.
People are maimed and killed by other people.  But that is not the
issue of high initial and low incremental costs.  Once people under
you have created a culture for and paid for an army that can conquer
your first city, it is not so expensive to conquer the second.  Well,
it is expensive for the victims, both in the city and in your army who
are killed or wounded.  But I am presuming that 'you' are at a high
level, a ruler of some sort.

"The ability to turn others into dead meat or slaves, that is what
gave us the Spartans' current reputation.  We think of the ability as
a willingness to sacrifice, forgetting its purpose.  It was a
willingness of superiors, with the connivance of subordinates, to
sacrifice young soldiers and victims."

Peter stopped for a moment while Dingle spoke into a microphone.
Dingle's computer was converting speech to text; but Dingle had to
indicate which parts of the interview he thought more important and
which less.  That is what people paid him for, the service of editing.

Dingle looked up and Peter started again.  "One problem is that the
Spartans had no way of dealing with dishonesty.  That is a standard
problem in every hierarchical organization with humans in it.  By
'they', I mean the Spartans' military as an institution, not ordinary
people.  But the Spartans' government did learn to withdraw from
places where their military became too corrupt.  They withdrew from
Athens within a generation after they won the Peloponnesian War.

"Our replicators are the same.  It cost a fortune to design the first.
It took more than a generation.  But then it costs little to
manufacture more, to make copies."

Vallen read Dingle.  The man appeared to select well.  Consequently,
Vallen heard about the duplication of Meldon's Microwave through him.
That caused Vallen to pay more attention, and to gather information
from numerous sources.  Peter's group never tried to sell any copies
that they manufactured, or anything like that.  So there was never any
direct financial issue.

But the result was evident.  Anything Vallen's business could
manufacture, Peter could duplicate and manufacture.  With Meldon's
recorder and Peter's assembler, they could duplicate the computer
chips, the memories, and the programming of anything manufactured.

Of course, Vallen and his people were good at catching people's
attention.  They were good at creating wants.  They could advertise.
But Vallen knew that a good portion of the profits he depended on came
from elsewhere.  Some came from patents and copyrights.  They came
from high prices that required governments prevent competition.
Otherwise, Adam Smith's invisible hand would ensure that the greedy
would cut prices a little, and gain sales.  All would be forced to
keep cutting prices until they equaled costs and conventional profits.

Another portion of profits did not depend on governments, but did
depend on having a small number of competitors who understood each
other and avoided undercutting; the number had to be too few for Adam
Smith's invisible hand to have any effect.  With too many competitors,
someone would undercut, even if they all understood.  The invisible
hand would take effect.  Someone's desire for a short term profit
would overcome long term worry.  With few, prices could stay high.

Vallen knew that in combination, Peter and Filgard's machines cut any
barrier to entry.  From his point of view, there would be too many
competitors.  There would be no difference, except in people's wants,
between the lowest quality model that Vallen's group sold and his
best.  There would be no financial motive for designing anything new.
The world would have to return to the old days.

In ancient times, as far as Vallen remembered from university, laws
and plays were invented and promulgated by people who did not expect
any direct reward.  He wondered if that were true.  If so, they had to
be like Aristotle's aristocrats, who acted because they were big
minded not because they were greedy.  Vallen figured the result would
be some advance, but not much.  He did not think there would be enough
advance to keep the world afloat.

Vallen believed that his people could continue to grab attention; they
had a service to sell.  But he wondered whether he would survive.

Vallen decided that Peter should not enable people to manufacture on
Earth.  In fact, a ban would be virtuous.  Besides encouraging
progress through financial encouragement -- Vallen preferred that kind
of phrase to any that used the one syllable word 'greed' -- a ban
would prevent anyone from releasing the equivalent of a bacterial
pathogen, whether intentionally or maliciously.  Such a release could
destroy part of his environment or even kill him.  Parts were already
being destroyed anyhow.  Vallen figured that no more should be put at
risk.  Peter had even mentioned the problem in a document that Vallen
saw, "This has been discussed and written about for generations."

Vallen was not so sure about manufacture off the planet, off Earth.
For one, he did not have any direct connections to space businesses.
None competed.  From Vallen's point of view, so long as 'Meldon
Microwaves' and their equivalents were not imported onto the planet,
off-planet manufacture could not matter.  And off-planet activities
might save the Earth or parts of it.

In particular, Earthly mining would become less necessary, especially
energy mining.  Rather than pump petroleum, which was still important,
although less was produced than before, inexpensive solar electricity
could convert air and water into burnable fuels.  Vallen thought this
would be a good idea.  He wondered whether others had thought the
same.  He did not know that others had had the same thought and had
decided, at least for this generation, against inexpensive
electricity.

With a few off-planet imports, mainly electricity, Vallen figured, few
technologies would change; prices could stay high.  In particular, his
technologies and prices would not have to change.

Vallen knew how to stop Peter and warn the rest.  His previous action
had failed, but that was a simple error.  Vallen doubted the next
murder would fail.

He was right.  Peter died instantly when his head was hit by a long
distance bullet.

Chapter 27
**********

Filgard was near the boundary of his land.  He was preparing more land
for a garden when he saw his neighbor, James Bevin, another professor
in the university, an astronomer.  "Those woods," Filgard said to
James, nodding his head at the forest going up behind their land,
"will be good for your pigs to root around in."

James did not think Filgard knew much about raising domesticated pigs.
"Nowadays, we feed them more on kitchen scraps and the like.  Besides,
those woods are owned by a logging company.  They will be cut down
within a few years."

"Cut down!"  said Filgard, "How can they do that.  In another century,
those will be the size of old growth trees, worth more."

"Yes," said James, "but the company has to discount the future.  It
has to consider the rate of interest on its capital.  When a company
makes much less money than its competitors, it goes out of business.
I am sure that the lesser value of those trees, discounted only ten
years, is much more than the greater value of mature trees, discounted
a century."

He paused for a moment.  "Remember, private companies have got to
evaluate their uses of capital.  They have got to be efficient."
Filgard understood that.  He tried always to be efficient.

James went on.  "Private companies require a positive rate of
interest.  It is the major constraint on them.  Otherwise, all you
will see is waste, waste, waste, rather than just some waste."

"I am seeing a lot of waste now," said Filgard.  "That is what the
world is like."

"No," said James, "that is a side effect.  You want good windows,
don't you, a warm house?"  He peered at Filgard, who nodded.
"Problems come because side effects build and become noticeable.  That
excludes simple errors, but they can be fixed within a generation or
so.  For long term errors, the set up must be wrong.  Only governments
can enforce doing right.  Only non-profits that do not use a business
rate of interest will do right on their own."

He paused for a moment.  "Look," he said, "there are at least two
valid rates of interest.  One has to do with things that occur within
a generation or less or within a human lifetime.  That is what
business is about and that rate of interest, that discount rate,
should be positive.

"What you eat ..." he nodded towards his pigs, "consider a pork chop;
the pig and it won't last long.  The soil on which the food to feed
the pig is grown, that must last.  They are different from each other,
not only in the obvious visual sense, but in how humans should
consider them.

"I am going to grow more pigs.  No individual pig will last very long.
I like pork chops!  On the other hand, when I feed soil with extra
nitrogen and phosphorus, I make sure that the nitrogen and phosphorus
are produced in some fashion that can last forever.  The pig fits into
one category; the soil, its nitrogen and phosphorus ... they fit into
another.

"As for categories concerning rates of interest, the second category
-- I can only think of two of them, maybe that is all there are -- has
to do with what I plan to pass on.  Soil, added nitrogen and
phosphorus, that sort of thing.  It is what is set aside for my
great-grandchildren and their great-grandchildren."  James stopped for
a second.  He remembered that Filgard did not have any children.  But
Filgard was not offended.  He thought of passing on memes, not genes.
James did not know the reason, but he saw that Filgard was not
bothered by his language.

"The second rate of interest has to be zero.  Otherwise, in a century,
in a thousand years, whatever I am valuing loses too much.  People who
expect equities to grow have the same problem.  Interest rates,
discount rates, so long as they are positive, they are a way of
comparing the values of items over distances of time or space.  The
further away the item is, the less valuable it is."

Filgard spoke, "New technologies always change prices and procedures;
depending on who does the engineering, they change participation, too.
Those three 'Ps' -- in English, prices, procedures, and participation,
who does what, how, and for what reward -- we learned those in
engineering school.  That is how markets and innovation are stifled;
you control who does what, that is, who participates, how they do it,
that is, their procedures, and what their reward is, that is, their
prices."

James ignored the politics.  Instead, he looked up and said, "Even at
the low rate of two percent per year, the university decided when I
came that my being warm would be worth a third less now than then.  I
don't feel that.  Indeed, to me, my being warm, my breathing is worth
as much to me now as it was then."

James paused.  "Some things, like air, are as valuable to people in
the far past or the far future as to people now.  And some things,
like trees which filter air, are dual-use.

"We need to watch them, that is to say, some of us need to watch what
is done with trees."

"Dual-use?"  asked Filgard.  He had never thought of trees that way.

James said, "Trees' character is just like that of dual-use industrial
items, such as chemical plants which make precursors that can be used
to make civilian insecticides or military nerve gasses.  But it is not
that trees can be converted militarily; well, they can be, but that is
not the issue.  The issue has to do with the far future and the near.
Should we say that people in the far future are not worth the cost of
them breathing?  That is what a positive rate of interest says, at
least for certain items.

"I know that the largest reforestation in the world is taking place in
the north east of the United States; it has been going on for decades.
That is because most of the land is owned in small lots, relatively
speaking, so the trees are not cut.  It is expensive to cut a small
lot; and the owners do not get much.  In other words, the ecology is
dependent on a social happenstance."

Filgard recognized a change in topic.  He wondered whether or if James
would connect this new one with interest rates.  Meanwhile, he said,
"A single government won't work.  What happens when the government is
wrong?  Besides, most of the world does not pay much attention to any
government."

"That's true," said James.  "You cannot depend on a single government
and over much of the world, hardly anyone follows a government, except
as they are compelled."  'Clearly,' thought Filgard, 'James wants to
emphasize the idea; that is why he repeats it.  What is he getting
at?'

"Classical conventions ..." Filgard did not speak his thoughts about
James repeating an idea; instead, he followed James' more overtly.
"Classical conventions don't work either.  There has been enough
change to make whatever worked five, ten, or twenty thousand years ago
fail now."

"That's right," said James.  "That is why we need multiple non-profit
organizations.  After all, we are trying to shift the way decisions
are made.  This is predominately a political move."

"Yes, I see that," said Filgard.  "You see a different way for the
powerful to decide matters."

"We can depend on at least some of the non-profit organizations being
right.  Moreover, their income depends, or should depend, on gifts.
Their reason for a decision is different than simply that it has a
higher rate of return on short term investment."

James went on.  "Gifts are never a high enough portion of income to
solve the problems that taxes do.  Gifts cannot pay for educational
transfers, emergency transfers, and old age transfers.  But they are
or can be high enough to fund many different organizations."

'That,' thought Filgard, 'is his solution, where to generate the
ideas.'

James had paused.  He spoke again.  "We use different parts of our
brains to think of these different issues; only different kinds of
organization can do the same."

"What about many, many government grants, paid out of taxes?"  Filgard
asked.  "That is a way to fund many different organizations."

"If that can be done competently," said James.  "The problem is that
in normal times, government programs are even harder to stop than
misdirected gifts."

"Hmm ..." Filgard muttered.  He was thinking and did not want
interruption.  Finally, he spoke.  "We do not want a non-profit to
last too long, not necessarily.  In Europe, the Catholic Church
survived Classical civilization and the Medieval period.  Regions were
shifting into the Modern era, a third civilization.  But by that time,
the Church had acquired through gifts," he stopped for a moment and
then said parenthetically, "(and otherwise, I know, but that is
neither here nor there) -- by that time, the Church had acquired
through gifts," he went on, "a good deal of property, some of it dual
use like this forest," he nodded towards the woods, "and some of it
primarily good for businesses."

He stopped for a moment, "Well, maybe all land should be valued with a
zero interest rate; or soil, or products grown on landed property
should be so valued.  I don't know.  I focus on other things.

"But," he stopped and glared, "at that time, the Church also hindered
knowledge gathering.  That is no good at all.

"It became a too powerful and a too well-connected non-profit," he
said.  He looked at James for a moment, and held up his hands, palm
forward, just like Trumman.

"I know you are named after a Christian apostle," -- James jerked; he
thought of himself as named after Scottish kings -- "but even so, that
hindering was not good, not after the increase in population after the
Black Death.  In a pre-industrial economy, taxes come from
agriculturalists, so governments wanted many peasants or serfs.
Otherwise, they were defeated in war.  It was not so much the size of
the armies that counted, pre-modern armies were small; it was the size
of the tax base."

Filgard paused again.  He was not glaring so much, but looking
thoughtful.  "So birth control was punished.  Malthus was right.
Without legal birth control, without the Black Death, population
increases.  Even corrupt governments could, if they wanted to, reduce
population.  But they won't want to.  After all, in pre-industrial
times, only one group in any technologically reachable region has to
become powerful.  That group will be the one with the most people.

"That is presuming everything else is equal.  Also, the group needs a
powerful belief system lest it fail to fight.  To succeed in gaining
power, it must go against villages in which infanticide is practiced
and kill women who know herbs for birth control or abortion.

"In such circumstances, you can only end war and poverty and the
suffering that goes with them by learning more.  It is morally bad to
be against reality, at least if you are against suffering.

"A person can be honest, wise, competent, benevolent and trustworthy,
but if he or she lives in illusion, if he or she does not determine
reality, then it become impossible to protect, preserve, prepare, or
provide, except by accident."

He stopped and grinned at James.  "Now you know why I think the
various anti-clerical actions over several centuries were helpful."
He looked at the forest again, and at the mountains.  "We need a
millennium in which that land is owned by some organization that
values the future as much as the present.  You are right, we need
organizations with zero interest rates, with long time horizons."

He paused again.  "In the old days, I think only a great religion
could survive the collapse of a civilization.  Well, maybe some
beliefs could, too."  He thought of Galen and his four temperaments.
"But those are beliefs.  As for organizations, I don't know of any
that could survive besides a religious one.  Do you know of any?"

He looked at James, who said, "Disconfirming evidence: medieval
universities came into the modern era; at least one ownership
cooperative in Sweden still exists ... I agree, such organizations are
rare; and they have changed mightily."  He stopped and thought for a
moment, then said, "I don't know of any organizations besides
religious that have survived two civilizations."

Filgard shifted to another topic.  "Either we can go forwards or we
can go backwards."  Then he remembered that not everyone thought in
technological terms and amended himself.  "We can either go forwards
or backwards technologically."

He continued speaking, "If we go backwards, people will die.  Wheat,
rice, and corn will become more expensive.  The poor, mostly people in
third world countries, will suffer more malnutrition and catch
illnesses that their immune systems could resist when they ate more.

"On the good side, some distant spots won't need human controllers;
they will not need owners.  The places will be too distant.  That is
an advantage of going backwards.  We humans have less impact.  Life
was simpler in the old days."  Filgard smiled at the last phrase.
'Life was simpler in the old days,' but probably not as people meant.

"If we go forwards, people may die.  That depends.  And the impact
depends on people's expectations.  People do not mind dying at the end
of an expected lifetime.  They try to avoid it personally, but
socially, it doesn't matter.

"Going forwards means that no spot is distant; that is a disadvantage
of going forwards."  James realized that Filgard was in a lecture
mode, but that is how he talked normally.

"Nowadays, every place is controlled by humans, willy-nilly.  That
spot of mountain is," he pointed towards a bit of forest going up
steeply, "even if no hunter or anyone else has walked over it for a
very long time.  Private property, ownership, that is just one form of
control.  Politically, private property means that a larger
organization does not need to pay attention, except to see that guides
are met."

James interrupted, "But what do we do now?"  "I don't know," said
Filgard.  "I am not a scientist; I cannot discover things.  I am an
engineer; I do produce what can be used to repair the planet.  You ...
you can reveal."  Filgard remembered his thoughts about Eltis' speech,
that an individual had only the choice of research, repair, or reveal,
'the three Rs.'

"To go further, we need organizations."  He smiled at his next remark,
"We need zero interest rate organizations, just as you say.  I don't
know whether they will be enough in quantity or power.  There are a
few, but I don't know."  He looked momentarily at the woods again.
"Pity about your pigs," he said.

Chapter 28
**********

When he heard the shot, George Thomas was bird watching.  George was
old and retired.  In addition to bird watching, he was searching for
edible wild plants.  The shot wasn't loud, but it was distinct.  Then
silence.  The silence startled George more than the shot.  There was
no sound at all.  Then crickets started chirping again and birds
singing.

Moments later, George saw someone rapidly walk down a trail away from
him.  The man -- it looked to George like a man -- carried a long,
thin, wrapped package.  He was not close.

It was not yet the season to hunt and George thought the man had been
poaching.  George said to himself that most likely the man had failed
to hit whatever he was aiming at and was now running away.  The story
fit together.  There was a hill up behind.  The man had hidden himself
in and shot from a good, natural blind which George had discovered on
a previous walk.

The blind would be a good place to shoot from except that the only
direction to aim was towards the town.  'Well,' George thought to
himself, 'that is dangerous.'  George favored hunting as such,
although he himself did not hunt for larger animals; however, he was
against unnecessary danger.  'You could shoot into closer ground, but
if you were to miss or aim too high, you could hit someone.'  That is
what he thought.

George wanted hunters to kill within season.  As far as he was
concerned, hunting was a kind of harvesting, a foraging.  George did
not think government officials did a bad job deciding when to hunt, so
he was not against their imposition of hunting seasons.

The man vanished at the turn of the trail and then appeared again.
There were almost no trees between the two, although they were a good
distance apart.  It had to be the same man; there were no other people
walking on that trail and he was carrying was looked to George like a
wrapped rifle.

The man was heading towards a car parked properly by the road.  George
unlimbered his bird-spotting telescope, focused on the car and found
that not only could he draw it, like he could distant birds, he could
write down its licence plate number.  So he did.  As George guessed,
the man with the long, thin wrapped package came to the car, looked
around, saw no one, unlocked the car, got in, and drove off.

George promptly telephoned a hunting official he had met.  "I just saw
a man I think was poaching dangerously," he said.  "I made a
description of his car and wrote down its licence plate number."  He
described where he was and what he had seen.  The hunting official
said he would see what he could do.  "Don't expect much.  We might
stop the wrong man.  The man might have a legitimate reason for being
there ... who knows.  On the other hand, it was real foolish to be
where he was and do what he did.  Thank you.  As I said, I will see
what I can do."

The assassin was dead before George next connected with anyone.  He
found common mallow on the edge of a pasture.  He planned to use it as
the base of a soup.  He also found wild onions by the side of a
stream, and chamomile, from which he intended to make tea.  He saw
three rare birds, but none to add to his life list and none to draw.

The assassin was Gerald.  He had told Vallen a different name this
time, and Vallen used it.  But Vallen still thought of the man as
Gerald, although he suspected that 'Gerald' was fake and knew the new
name was.

On the road, Gerald heard that his car was to be stopped -- as usual,
another crook, again, someone officially in the police department, had
sold him the ability to decrypt police messages.  Gerald was careful.

Only one policeman came up from behind.  That man had heard the
description of a car which had passed his speed trap moments before.
So he gave up on the speed trap and drove after the car.  Its license
plate number was the one reported so he turned on his lights and
siren.  The driver stopped the car and the cop came up.  Gerald killed
him with a accurate shot to the head.  Unlike most crooks, Gerald did
not shoot at the man's bulletproof jacket.  Gerald did not expect to
miss even though he was using a pistol rather than a rifle and even
though the policeman was sidling up along the car rather than coming
to its door as a normal person.  There was no doubt in Gerald's mind
that hitting the policeman by what amounted to a padded sledge hammer
would slow him; indeed the policeman was somewhat expecting that.

Unfortunately for the policeman, Gerald was not sure that a blow on
the chest would stop the man, and Gerald wanted to stop him.
Unfortunately for the assassin, as he realized a few moments later, a
cop had colleagues.  They were upset to see on a transmitted video
that one of their own was killed.

In a remarkably short time -- Gerald had not even considered going
onto another road or leaving the car and then avoiding sniffers --
multiple police cars stood across the road in a second block.  This
time there were eight police.  Each was fully armored.  In addition to
their body jackets, they all wore face masks that were attached in
such a way that a wearer could move his or her head, but no bullet
could snap a neck.

By chance, an instructor had been taking seven students from the
police academy to practice 'advanced traffic management techniques.'
They formed the road block.  The students were scared.  They had
learned about road blocks but had never formed one ahead of a someone
who had just killed another cop.  The instructor was scared, too.  He
figured his people would turn into good cops with seasoning, but they
had not had enough, yet.

Gerald looked at them all for a moment.  He did not realize that he
could have killed five or six before he died rather than two.  He
decided to kill none.  He would gain nothing by killing or not
killing.  Instead, he turned his pistol on himself and committed
suicide.  Other than that, no one pulled a trigger.

Chapter 29
**********

Filgard was planting in the garden he had prepared earlier.  He met
James again, who was walking his bounds with two pigs following him,
like dogs.  'Perhaps,' Filgard thought, 'they got imprinted on him.'

Filgard asked.  James responded, "Yes, that is exactly what happened.
Taking them on walks is another matter.  But they are old enough and
they still think of me as their mother."

Filgard then said, "I have been thinking about your remarks regarding
zero and positive interest rates.  The notion is helpful."

James answered, looking at Filgard happily, but somewhat sour at the
same time.  "That may be.  But people are not rational."  'That',
thought Filgard, 'is why he is somewhat sour.'

"Our whole culture," said James, "appears to be focused on people and
organizations that consider only positive interest rates.  And our
enemies, or some of them," he corrected himself, "besides being
against learning, only focus on zero interest rates."

Filgard remembered one of his discussions in that faculty lounge, and
said, "We know that people do not think ahead, except for a few.  Only
those who think a long ways ahead will want zero interest rates."

"But it is dangerous," James said immediately, "to permit only a few
to enter government; then the selection process becomes critical.  It
becomes corrupt.  You may end up with a ban on usury, but then you do
not have the positive interest rates that are also needed."

James went on.  "There are three potentially safe ways to choose
leaders, two of which are in use now.  One is by state, which is to
say, by an ancient region, as in the United Nations General Assembly
or the United States Senate; and the second is by units of population,
which is the current desire.  The third method is by taxes paid.  That
is not done.  Money is important, but most of the rich seek to cut the
fees they pay rather than increase their power publicly.  In each way
candidates can be chosen through votes.  Of course, votes can be
stolen, voting methods corrupted."

Filgard spoke as if he had not heard.  He was still thinking about the
earlier issue.  "The Melior Movement," he said, "argues that a
political leadership needs to set up the rules for business; after
all, as you said earlier, you can't do without business.  People need
shoes, which wear out.  You need to produce those shoes with an
efficient employment of people and machinery.  Otherwise, you are just
wasting people's time, whether it be building machinery or making
shoes.

"At the same time, a government needs to set up the rules for
non-businesses, since people and their children need a decent planet
to survive.  That is your distinction between entities using a
positive rate of interest and entities using a zero rate of interest."

Thinking back on James earlier remark about reforestation in the north
east of the United States, he said, "We cannot depend on a social
happenstance for safety."

He tipped his head from one side to another.  "Some people don't care
much for the distant future; they prefer the present.  Those are the
people who presume positive rates of interest.  Others do care.
Nonetheless, that gives us only a two-fold distinction, a zero and a
positive rate of interest.  Galen, Plato, and Aristotle spoke of four
human temperaments."

Filgard shifted to the digression, although James did not need to
learn that Plato, Aristotle, and Galen lived a long time ago.  He was
curious about Filgard's attitude towards their lesser degree of
knowledge.  Filgard did not disappoint.

"Plato, Aristotle, and Galen did not know as much as we do, but that
does not mean they weren't smart.  To produce their four temperaments,
we need another distinction.

"Interestingly," Filgard said, apparently in an aside, "the
Melancholic, as Galen called them, definitely care about positive
interest rates.  They are the people Aristotle called 'Proprietary'
and Plato called 'Guardians.'  They worry about immediate crises.
People with the other three temperaments do not think about interest
rates as much."  He stopped momentarily and grinned at James, "At
least, I think that is a good hypothesis to begin with."

James kept at his own issue.  He knew that Filgard was paying
attention to him, but not responding right away.  Filgard had to
follow through a topic deeply.  "What leaders will do," James said, "a
future action, does not help us much with selecting them, which is a
present action."

Filgard seemed to shift to another topic.  "People in the Melior
Movement speak of four aids for reasoning politically, _protect_,
_preserve_, _prepare_, and _provide_."  Then he responded directly to
James.  "Their notion is that everyone should take part in selecting
leaders, and they should use those four criteria in making their
selection.  It is true, what leaders actually do and what they promise
to do -- those can be different.  But when you pay attention, you can
tell when a politician breaks a promise.  Then you can vote for
someone else.  So the four aids are useful."

James reverted to Filgard's earlier worry.  "What about weighing the
future?"

Filgard looked bemused.  "It is useful, this distinction between zero
and positive rates of interest," he said.  "Weighing the future."  He
had immediately and implicitly thought of weighing in a mathematical
sense, of giving items of different ages different weights.  He
thought of this as similar to a discount or to a positive rate of
interest.

"I had not heard of the distinction before you mentioned it, James.
It makes considerable sense.  Organizations that value with a positive
rate of interest care little about the distant future.  They discount
it.  On the other hand, organizations with a zero discount think
distant people are as important as people present; they value people
we cannot point at, people we cannot imagine, our distant
descendants."

James noted that Filgard was bouncing several notions around his mind
at once, temperaments, the future, four aids to reasoning, the
distinction itself.  James was certain Filgard would sort it out
eventually.

Meanwhile, Filgard said simply, "I don't know anyone in the Melior
Movement who has thought about discounting, about rates of interest.
It certainly have never come to my attention.  It does not contradict
what they have done; it extends it."

James shifted topics a bit.  "It sounds like you are becoming a
Melian," he said.

James, who had read Thucydides, thought of the Melians as losers.
Like their modern namesakes, there were few of them.  At the original
time, when a part of the Athenians lost their morality, they massacred
the men and sold the surviving women and children as slaves.
Nonetheless, he listened to Filgard.

"Well," said Filgard, "I like their ideas.  I think they are right.
But I am too old to learn a new language, so I won't add to any
settlement they make.  Besides, I don't think they will win."

He went on.  "Still, I like Eltis Akthorn, their charismatic leader.
She is the woman who is organizing the movement, their euhemerus.  I
have seen her a few times since Peter's murder.  She is like a
daughter."

James nodded.  Filgard said, "Next time I see her, I am going to speak
of zero interest rates and positive interest rates.  You are right, we
need organizations that think for long periods of time.  We need zero
interest rates.  We also need efficient, everyday organizations.  We
need both.  That means different people in different organizations.
Eltis can incorporate the notions into her talks."

James smiled.  "You could go into space."

Filgard looked up.  "Yes, and if you believe that you can believe
anything," he said.  "We might as well wish for the moon.  So, people
have been there.  The moon is doable.  But it is expensive to go
there, too expensive for you or me."  He never thought of himself as
sufficiently famous.  He figured he would be like everyone else.

"As for ideas: is the traditional notion of temperament ..."

'Ah hah!'  thought James.  'He is returning to a topic discussed
earlier and then almost forgot.'

"Is the traditional notion of temperament," asked Filgard, "useful
either to the people setting up a better place or to the people who
might end up living there?  Or a more modern notion?  I am not sure.

"Your comments about rates of interest, they are useful.  Different
organizations must evaluate the distant future differently.  The
notion fails to distinguish types of temperament usefully.  It selects
only one temperament out of four.  It is a descriptor, not a
discriminator."

James rocked back.  He wondered where Filgard was going.  He was
following along on his side of their mutual property line as Filgard
was slowly planting a row.  James was willing to predict that shortly
Filgard would decide that planting was boring and spend his time
designing a robot to do it.  Meanwhile, James was not planting.  The
two could talk.

"You have mentioned temperaments several times.  What do you mean,"
James asked, "when you said that Galen, Aristotle, and Plato spoke of
four human temperaments?"

"Well," said Filgard, "Galen spoke of Sanguine, Melancholic, Choleric,
and Phlegmatic temperaments.  He lived centuries after Plato and
Aristotle.  He met the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and became a
court physician to him.

"Galen had a false medical theory.  He thought that a person's
character depended on a balance of his or her bodily fluids.  Each of
those terms comes from one or other fluid.  He was wrong, but his
beliefs remained commonplace in Europe for over a thousand years.
They outlasted the fall of two civilizations.  I suspect that
practitioners valued the descriptions of character and did not bother
to judge the rest.  For one, they lacked the technology.  As an
example, they did not have microscopes and could not see microbes.

"On the other hand," Filgard brought his eyebrows together, looking
puzzled, "they had forests.  Forests can get invaded by the visible
but small, like caterpillars, as well as by the visible and big, like
deer.  Caterpillars eat leaves; deer eat bark.  Too many and the
forest dies.  It can also be hurt by fire, which is a non-living
danger.

"People are smaller than forests, so just as forests can be harmed by
too many caterpillars or too many deer, so could people, except that
the human equivalents of caterpillars and deer would not be visible.
They would be too small to see.  That is analogy; it is based on
reasoning, but nothing else.  Well, it is also based on observations
of forests.  In any case, it is a digression.  A thousand years ago,
no one compared people and forests, at least, not with regard to
medicine."

Filgard carried on.  "To return to temperament: the much earlier
Aristotle evaluated people.  He named their temperaments according to
the type of pleasure they sought.  Thus, the kind of person that Galen
called Sanguine, Aristotle called Hedonist.  He claimed that people
with that temperament valued sensual pleasure.  Plato, for all his
idealism, looked at what people did.  The Sanguine made beauty."

James nodded and Filgard continued.  "The second fluid Galen
considered was black bile.  Too much was supposed to produce a
Melancholic temperament.  Aristotle referred to that type as
Proprietary, as people who gain pleasure by acquiring material assets.
I mentioned them before.

"Those are the people who value positive rates of interest.  Nothing
is worth much that belongs to distantly future descendants and not to
the person.  You are saying that much of the world is organized around
this notion.  You are right.

"Plato called these people Guardians.  They guard a city, making both
the material it needs and fighting in its army.  As Fairta once told
me, they work hard and are very necessary for survival.

"According to Galen, the Choleric have too much yellow bile.
Aristotle called them Ethical and Plato called them Idealists.

"The fourth type is Phlegmatic.  Others often think of them as calm,
but that is because they concern themselves with items that are not
necessarily practical immediately.

"Aristotle referred to this type as Dialectical, because they enjoy
logical investigations.  He was one; I'm one; you are one.  Eltis is
one, although she is different from you or me.  She is more likely to
harness people and resources than you or I; she is good at
coordinating.  Me, I am more a teacher.  I'm more informative than
directive; and I am a good engineer."

He stopped and laughed.  "Plato called our type the Rationals, because
of our reasoning sensibility.  I like the term.  It suits me fine; it
is what I seek.  If you think of Plato himself as an idealist, he
picked an ideal name for the likes of you and me."

James saw that they were nearly back to where they started.  Filgard
had planted the row, turned, and planted back.

Filgard went on.  Just as he was planting seeds into the ground, some
people would have thought him driving the subject into the ground.
Except he was talking of different aspects of it.  James saw the
discussion as associative, but quite different from the kind that
others enjoyed.

Filgard continued to paraphrase Fairta.  He had decided that what she
said was interesting.  He still did not know how true the distinctions
were.  He said, "According to Fairta, some say that those types are
the biggest, but that there are more than four.  Temperaments are
beneficial, but when a person goes too much one way or the other, he
becomes dangerous either to himself or to others.  Thus, as Fairta
said that the Sanguine are liable to mania when their works and
optimism become too much.

"The Sanguine divide people into groups.  When you talk of that kind
of division, which is good Aristotelian logic, I keep thinking of milk
in a cup and milk spilled."  Filgard smiled again.  "I suspect that
when I was a child, I spilled milk, but I don't remember."

James agreed.  "I think we all did," he said.

"In any case," Filgard continued, "one distinction is between those
who prefer to focus on other people and those who prefer to focus on
getting a task done.  The first group try to produce harmony within a
group.  That is very useful.  If you do not cooperate, you do not get
anywhere.  The second group try to produce.  That is useful, too.  If
you do not produce food, you die.

"As a practical matter, people lie on a continuum, some at one end,
some at the other, and many in the middle.  But let us presume the
continuum has been cut; there are two groups, those who prefer harmony
and those who prefer utility.

"Then, when you think of another distinction that crosses the first,
you end up with four items, or in this case, four temperaments.  We
talked earlier about the second distinction, between short term and
long term thinking."

Actually, Filgard was not sure whether he had discussed it with James
or whether he had talked with some one else.  So he went into more
detail.

"Again.  Divide people into two groups.  The first group prefer to
think of futures less than a year.  They are able to think in longer
terms, but worry more about immediate uncertainty, like that caused by
a flood or an invasion of caterpillars.

"The second group prefer to think further ahead.  In any population,
few need to think long term.  It is costly.  Those people do not focus
on what needs to be done now.  But memories of what happened long ago,
like a drought, or thoughts of what might happen in the future, like a
flood, that is what they think about and those thoughts are useful.
After all, people survive and conditions change."

Filgard stopped for a moment.  James was too wise to say anything.
Then Filgard went on.  "Hah!  Maybe I am wrong to think that the old
notions won't help."

James was a bit surprised at this statement, but then he realized that
Filgard was applying these two distinctions to create the four
anciently described temperaments to deal with the issue of usury and
its opposite.

Filgard said, "When you apply these two criteria, you end up with the
four traditional temperaments, of which only one, the Guardian,
actively prefers a positive rate of interest."

He explained, "The first criterion, the one involving harmony and
utility, divides people into two groups.  The Guardians and Idealists
are on the one hand.  They are mainly concerned with getting along
with others, one way or another.  The second group consists of the
Sanguine and Phlegmatic.  They are mainly concerned with utility, with
production, regardless whether their actions offend anyone.

"As for the second criterion, which involves thinking short term and
long term, that puts the Guardians and Sanguine into one group, and
the Idealists and Phlegmatic into the other.  Guardians think short
term, so intrinsically, they must devalue the distant future.  So they
must prefer a positive rate of interest.  The Artisans also think
short term, but they focus on whether something produces.  So if it is
shown that positive rates of interest are not helpful, they won't have
them.

"They are more neutral.  They are also fewer of them compared to
Guardians.  However, Melanchois and the Sanguine together make up more
than half a population.  Moreover, the Melancholic, that is to say,
the Guardians, are much more likely than the Sanguine to work within
traditions, institutions, and organizations, although like Fairta,
they can.  The Guardians shape.  Positive interest rates will
predominate.  The other two types, the Idealists and the Rationals,
are much more dreamy."

"Yes," said James.  "I can even visualize a mandala.  Guardians are in
the upper left and Idealists in the upper right.  Both seek harmony.
The Sanguine are in the lower left and the Phlegmatic in the lower
right.  Both seek utility.

"Or you can divide the mandala left and right, like black and white.
On the left side are people who plan ahead as far as they can
practically, which is not very far.  On the right are people who
ignore immediate plans but consider distances.  It all makes sense.
But is it real?

"In any case," James said, "two time horizons may not be enough.  You
are just talking short term and long term; you may need a third.  For
example, I have heard economists say that for the short term, by which
they mean less than three years, fluctuations in unemployment, demand,
and capacity are more important.  In the middle term, three to eight
years, fluctuations in the composition of demand become more
important, and in the long term, technology becomes important since
the technology a society has implimented defines its productive
capacity."

"With three time horizons, thinking becomes complex," said Filgard.
"The great advantage of two is that people can remember them readily.
Moreover, they fit into this mandala of four."

"Are you saying that we should shift our explanations according to the
human capacities of those who can only think two or four items at
once?"  asked James.

"Yes," said Filgard.  "The notion is not about the natural world.
That may indeed be complex.  The goal is to help people decide which
action to take.

"On a different subject, but using two divided in half, four total,
Fairta proposed a connection between four Galenic temperaments and
Fiske's notion of social structure, that people perceive and organize
everything according to categorical, ordinal, interval, and ratio
scales.  Whether ... "

"Yes, yes," said James, "whether you are in or out of prison; whether
you are equal to, below, or above another; whether you can cooperate
with others in some way; and whether you can talk about interest rates
with them ... That is all straight forward."

"What?"  asked Filgard.  "It is mathematics," said James, "a
categorical scale is based on an equivalence relation, whether you are
free or not, whether you spilled water out of a cup; an ordinal scale
is based on a linear ordering, whether you or your division manager is
more powerful -- Fairta talked about social structures, right?  A
university like ours only partially fits a linear ordering.  Our
social structure is much more complex.

"An interval scale is based on an ordered Abelian group.  There is a
famous 19th century French statement about equality under the law,
which is what an ordered Abelian group or interval scale is about:

     _'... anyone may sleep under a bridge, whether rich or poor.'_

"A ratio scale is based on an Archimedean ordered field.  That
determines whether you can compare an apple and an orange or a house
and a bridge.  Those two fruits or edifices are in different
categories.  One is not necessarily better than the other; an ordered
scale fails.  They don't necessarily share much, so an interval scale
fails.  Only a ratio scale succeeds.  The mathematics is very common.
It just needs to be translated into social terms.  What evidence do
you have?"

"The mathematics is not common in my world."  "Yes, it is," said
James, "but it may not be much expressed.  It is the basis for
elementary arithmetic, what an entity is and how one number relates to
others; that gives us the first two.  Then we have two kinds of
operator, addition (and subtraction, which goes with it) and
multiplication (and division, which goes with multiplication).  That
gives us four."

"Oh," said Filgard.  "I don't remember whether I ever learned that.
It is certainly not talked about much."

"I don't remember anyone talking about it in my field.  But it is
obvious, is it not?"  asked James.

"Only if you are a widely educated Rational," said Filgard.  "I am a
Rational, and well educated, but not widely enough.  I don't know
whether anyone else will care."

"You said Fairta brought this up," said James.  "She was not a
Rational."

"No," said Filgard, "but I think she was trying to please me and
Eltis; and she knew how to do that, how to get us mulling over an
idea."

"That may well be true.  But what, if any, are the implications?"
James asked.

"A category," said Filgard, "can expand or contract.  Socially, when
you are entering an uninhabited area, it makes sense to expand the
category of 'friend', since anyone you do meet is likely to help.  But
if you are entering an inhabited or contracting area, anyone you meet
is likely to resist your taking their place.

"This has immediate political implications, since the planet may
collapse or contract; but outer space, as far was we know, is empty of
sentients.  So if we want to be friendly, we have head for the 'new
frontier' as U. S. President Kennedy called it; otherwise, we will
have to fight.  The choice is political, whether fighting or
friendship."

James almost laughed.  "So you are getting into politics in your old
age.  You are right, the choice is whether to be a warrior or a
diplomat.  I don't know whether you need this rigmarole about
temperaments and social structures to say that."  James sobered.
"Also," he said, "you are saying that going backwards may be
dangerous, not only to others, but to us."

He noted that Filgard had dodged his questions about evidence, whether
his mandala had any basis.  But he did not say anything.  Was Filgard
beginning to accept beliefs that might not be true?  The man had been
very different since Fairta died.  James wondered.  Filgard raised his
head and gazed in the distance.  James decided that in any event, he
was a dreamer who had accomplished much.

'Nonetheless,' James went away asking himself, 'in his own mind, does
Filgard think he has accomplished enough?'

Chapter 30
**********

Filgard spoke at Peter's funeral.  He asked himself why Peter's middle
name, _Antor_ lacked an _h_; it was not 'Ant_h_or' but 'Peter Antor
Dev.'  He never did find out.

Filgard found it very easy to say good things about Peter.  He had
been a good graduate student and a good man.  Since then he had done
well, both for himself and for the world.

Eltis Akthorn came to the funeral.  That surprised Filgard.  He did
not think she paid any attention.  Moreover, she was more somber than
he expected.  He was not as unhappy as she, even though she was
relatively a stranger.

She came up to him after the service.  "This is a very sad time."  She
blinked back tears.  "He is gone.  I liked him.

"And I don't think we are going to win.  The powers that be are too
powerful.  We cannot have more people murdered.  We have not grown so
much that individuals do not matter."

Filgard was not sure whether she was more upset at Peter's death or at
her movement losing.  She was reserved.  Filgard realized he was, too.
Besides that, he caught a sense of failure.  She spoke about the
movement, except that by now, she was starting to pronounce it with a
capital 'M'.  Clearly, it was on her mind.

"The best we can do," she said, "is become a cult or equivalent.  That
means as an organization we can expect to go corrupt after a few
generations.  Look at 20th century Israel.  It started as a series of
small, optimistic, cooperative endeavors in a bleak territory; it
grew.  It was decent.  That is how it looks to me.  And then over
several generations, it became a garrison state.

"Well, at least, we should pick a location where our neighbors like
us.  Unfortunately there are even fewer places with low populations
now than there were at the beginning of the 20th century."

Filgard also did not want to think about Peter's death, so he welcomed
Eltis' remarks.  He protested briefly.  "The Zionists did not have
much choice of where to go.  Others did.  They left Europe and spread
around the world."

"Well," said Eltis, "Palestine was not heavily populated at the
beginning of the 20th century; and in any case, we do have a choice of
where to go.

"Fortunately -- and this is about the only good news -- more and more
people will want the drugs which can be inexpensively manufactured
with Peter's nano-technological assemblers.  They will want other
inexpensive products from the spray-droplet replicators.  We will have
something to provide.  If an ecological collapse comes, we can help
even more.

"So we can start some place."

She stopped for a moment, then went on, "With your recorder, with
spray-droplet replicators, and with Peter's nano-assemblers, we can
provide people with their material needs without destroying the
environment."

Filgard noted that that was exactly what Peter had said.

"Besides the technology, we have decent political notions.  We have
aids for reasoning politically, _protect_, _preserve_, _prepare_, and
_provide_."

Filgard nodded.  He remembered.  The Melior Movement did talk of them.
Eltis went on, "Of course, we will have to pay continuing license fees
for what we manufacture; the governments that support high prices will
see to that.  Otherwise, Peter will have lived his life truly in
vain."  Both Eltis and Filgard wanted to distance themselves from
Peter's death, but his work returned to remind them.  Still, Eltis was
able to shift away a bit.

"Worse, governments' support of high prices is becoming the major way
for them to fund research.  High prices do not appear on their
budgets; and only those who have to pay buy.  It looks like a good
scheme.  Off budget, only those who desire pay ... (Of course," she
said parenthetically, and Filgard realized it was not possible for her
to stop being a politician of a certain sort, "they never consider
what must be bought to live a conventional, middle class life, which
is what most people want.)"

He nodded again, and listened to her.  "It goes without saying that
less and less research is done.  The powerful gain income from the
high prices that others pay.  They live better when governments or the
corporations they control take the money rather than spend it on
scientists and engineers.

"But we can probably extract enough basic resources.  Those are not
licensed.  We can sell them.  We can pay licensing fees.  In any case,
our negotiating position will be powerful; rulers are scared of the
possibility that we will develop weapons.

"A better language and a better numerical system are only possible if
people are reborn and if we can modify the data packets of dead
people.  We do not have the technology for doing that yet, although it
is getting closer.  Tuppak Nassik is working on it.  We need to be
able to put the language and numerical system into the data.  Then the
reborn can learn."

Filgard did not know about Nassik's work.  He believed that Eltis
intended to speak of hopes for very far future as a way of avoiding
any conversation about Peter.  Since he did not want to consider Peter
either, he went along.

Eltis said, "While we are at it, if we can modify people's data
packets, we can provide everyone with formal aids to judgment."  She
smiled, "I mean information on certainty factors, on insurance, on how
to judge the likelihood of a one-time-only event, on how to assign
priorities to a long list of items, and on how to multiply many
differently weighed factors together.  Adults do not want to learn
anything."

He spoke out, "That is not true.  I am an adult; I like to learn.  You
do, too."

"Well, I mean many adults do not want to learn.  But grown ups can
learn.  After all, immigrants expect to learn a new language.  But
adult immigrants have a hard time."

She considered everything again, then said, "As for people to whom we
will be highly attractive: their governments will not permit anyone to
tell them about us; they will censor what we have to say.  And they
will forbid travel to those who do find out.  As for the rest, I do
not know how attractive we are.  I don't think we are much.  Those
people live well enough already.  We shouldn't raise much of a barrier
against them."

Filgard felt he was in that category.  He lived pretty well.  He did
not want to learn a new language.

Unfortunately for Filgard, Eltis talked again about language.  "It
makes sense to learn a common language.  That is necessary.
Otherwise, we cannot mix peoples."  Filgard agreed with the need; he
did not like Eltis' conclusion: "Immigrants will have to learn a new
language."

Filgard figured that would keep him out, although he did not tell
Eltis.

She went on, "As for learning formal aids to judgement?  Who cares
besides you and me and people like Peter?  Even if the Movement
attracts a higher portion of people like us, it won't be everybody.
Maybe the notions can be embedded in language lessons.  But learning a
different numerical system?  That is more difficult.  At least I think
it is.

"In any event, I am not certain that powerful governments will permit
us to start anything new, even if we pay them.  The people in them do
not like uncertainty.  They hardly ever think of non-human issues,
which is why they don't deal with them on a timely basis.  That cause
of uncertainty is invisible to them.  But we are human.  It is easy to
see what we will do, and we also produce uncertainty."

She concluded, "The future looks bleak."

Chapter 31
**********

Shortly after Peter's funeral, Eltis and others in the Melior Movement
found themselves considering an off planet colony, a colony in the
solar system.  They would set themselves up in an O'Neil habitat.

With cheap mechanisms to build the mirrors, with Peter's
nano-assembler to provide the computers, they could melt and spin a
nickel-iron planetoid, and put an air bubble into it.  They could
shape a solid two kilometer planetoid into a cylinder wider than tall,
ten kilometers across.  It would be naturally stable.

Melting that big a hunk of metal would be impossible on Earth.  It
would be impossible in space without replicators to build big enough
mirrors.  But with them, it could be done.  With a skin fifteen meters
thick, a hollow habitat could hold an atmosphere and shield its
inhabitants.

Because of its gyroscopic stability, and because it would not be
orbiting a not-quite-spherical body like the Earth, the spinning
habitat would always point the same way.  However, Eltis thought, a
main mirror could precess or turn enough to collect light throughout
the year and reflect it to one end of the habitat.  Eltis wanted, and
everyone else agreed, that a habitat should require the least amount
of maintenance possible.  Ideally, it would be like Earth before
humans.

A dozen such habitats might be enough for the Melians.

One or two might fail, but probabilistically speaking, a dozen would
not vanish at once, not naturally.  Nonetheless, they would be
vulnerable to people.  Suppose an enemy snuck bioweapons inside, or
detonated nuclear weapons by the mirrors?

That vulnerability killed the idea.

Chapter 32
**********

While walking on the beach, Vallen noticed a thicker log.  He picked
it up.  When he got home, he started carving a bust.  It did not have
arms or legs and its head was wider than the palm of his hand.  The
carving made its face serious, but not unhappily so.

The bust was not of anyone Vallen knew.  Still, no one could mistake
its humanity, even though its expression was a more extreme than
displayed publicly by any of Vallen's friends or colleagues.

After finding several more thick logs and carving more busts, he
noticed that he had stopped carving warriors.  He realized he was
cheered by Peter's death.  That is what he had wanted and that is what
he got.

It increased his confidence.  He specified pay rates with more vigor,
so his actions were challenged less.  It particular, he told his human
resources people to offer less.  The fight against was not very
strong.

Vallen despised the people he had hired for handling employment.  For
one, they referred to themselves as 'human resource' people.  Vallen
thought that was most likely because they treated otherwise decent
people as if they were rocks or other kinds of non-human resource.

Still, he was not going to fight them, even though he knew he could
get more product from his employees by better management.  It was not
even that he would lose by fighting them and leading everyone.  Very
good management was too idealistic, but better management was doable.
Better management meant higher efficiency, which meant more profit.
With more profit came more rewards, both for them and for him.  The
other way meant lower efficiency, but lower costs; he paid less.  That
meant more profit, too, with rewards for him.

Vallen was confident that the assassin, Gerald, had not left any
traces that could be detected.  Consequently, he thought there was
little chance that any search would reach him.  He need not and did
not do anything.  Peter was dead.  Because Gerald was not around to
ask for the remainder, the assassination cost Vallen only half what he
expected.

COMPLEX TOOLS was doing well; so was Meldon's Microwave.  So was
Vallen's home life.  All and all, Vallen felt fine.

Chapter 33
**********

The first test of rebirth was on a dying, but knowledgeable Tuppak
Nassik.  He had invented the plan he was going to use.  Tuppak told
the rest of his team, "I am going to die forever if we don't do this.
That means you may be out of a job.  If we do this, either it fails,
and I die, which I will do anyhow, or it succeeds, in which case I do
not die.  I developed the scheme.  I can try it.  But let us not make
this public.  Among other reasons, it is illegal."

He did not say that technically, it was suicide, not murder.  He
himself had carefully programmed the computer to freeze him.  The
others were accessories.  He figured, if it came to court, being an
accessory to suicide was not as dangerous as being an accessory to
murder.  But he hoped, and he thought most likely, his people would
never enter a court.

He kept on speaking, "In any case, it will be months before you
discover whether I am reborn like myself or not."

He paused to catch his breath.  He was not well.  "I have been against
pictures of me for a long time -- that was a useful anti-social
activity.  Had photographs been taken, people could see how old I am;
but they haven't.  And, as far as I know, most video surveillance
views of me are erased after thirty days.  I don't think many recent
views exist.  So if we are successful few will be surprised at the
visible age change."

Tuppak Nassik's scheme was to put a person to sleep, put them into
suspended animation which enabled the body to be cooled to just above
freezing, then put the body into a tank and raise its pressure
dramatically -- all these were known techniques -- and then freeze the
body suddenly and deeply.  The very high pressure in the tank would
counter expansion.

Tuppak knew that freezing would kill him, unlike the anesthesia,
suspended animation, cooling, and pressurization.  The liquid helium
would cool his body to just above absolute zero.

Then Meldon's recorder would be used to record him exactly.  In the
process, his body would be destroyed.  Tuppak would become dead in a
second way.

Then, the brain patterns recorded by Meldon's machine would be
impressed on a near clone of Tuppak.  It had once been thought that
such an impression had to occur as the brain grew, but Tuppak figured
out a different way.  He and his team also figured out how to force
such a body to grow rapidly.

The force-grown body was called a clone, although it differed from
him.  Instead of being a twin, the methods with which it was grown had
prevented its brain from developing normally.  That took quite a bit
of doing.

Even though he speeded its growth, Tuppak had taken years to grow his
first brainless clone.  Now it was at the equivalent of a physical age
just past adolescence.  To appear older, he was going to have to wear
makeup.  He would have liked to wait longer and perhaps use a
different clone, but he was dying and lacked the time.

So he conducted the experiment.  His body was frozen and destroyed.
It took ten months to impress his brain design into the clone.  During
that whole time, no one knew what would be the result.  The clone
never woke.

Tuppak had directed that his data packet be copied and saved.  He
directed that if the first experiment failed, his group should try
again, even if he woke up and became conscious before dying.
Potentially, he was willing to suffer a great deal.

Fortunately, the first experiment succeeded, although when Tuppak
first awoke, he said, "Everything is out of focus."  Worse, he could
not walk, but stumbled.  He said he felt weird pains and other
feelings.  But he was alive and ready for tests.  Not to him, but to
others' surprise, he got better after about a month.  He could focus,
he could walk, he did not have pains.  Tests indicated no more mental
deficit.  It was not necessary to replicate the effort on another
body.

Indeed, after six weeks Tuppak said that "This body is better than my
last one.  It's taller.  During its growth, even though we forced it,
we gave it good nutrients.  It had a better time during its
development than I did."

He smiled.  "We can do it, we can enable people to be reborn," he
said.  "But the process is not comfortable, not at all.  Waking is
bad.  We can get rid of the imaginary pains and other such feelings;
they come from mis-connections we can fix.  But people are going to
have to come awake.  They will have to open their eyes to relearn to
focus; they will have to walk to relearn to walk; they will have to
think to relearn to think.  There is no way to avoid being awake.  If
I can help it, I am not going to do this again for years."

Others had suffered a great deal more than he, but Tuppak thought of
himself and people like him.  He did not like rebirth.  He converted
his other clones into more general chemicals.  Neither he nor anyone
in his group thought of them as human; they showed no mental activity
at all.

The chief of another group was reborn next.  In a sense it was
competing.  Gelson Farbanks had spent time designing inorganic,
computer substrates for humans to upload to.  All looked promising;
none worked.  He had been growing a brain-dead clone for the past
seven years.  "Just in case," he said.  "Well, my case has come."
Gelson had started the clone at the same time as Tuppak.  There was
always the question of how he had learned to make the clone brainless,
that is to say, without a brain that grew normally.

In theory, he could have succeeded had he started at just the time
Tuppak made the explanation public.  But it would have been easier had
he started earlier.  In any event, Tuppak did not investigate.
Gelson's clone was not as forced as Tuppak's and was younger, a
physical age in its teens.

Gelson was not as old as Tuppak but his arthritis was worse.  None of
his treatments had succeeded.  He was different than most in some
unknown way.

So Gelson said to Tuppak, "I'll adopt your plans.  I will be
cooperative.  I cannot stand this body."  Like the first, that
transfer went right.  Moreover, Tuppak had learned.  Gelson did not
suffer imaginary pains and other strange feelings.  Initially, he did
see badly and could not walk or think well.  Under Tuppak's
supervision, he got better quickly.  It took Gelson only three weeks
to say that he preferred his new body to his old.  But he also said
that the experience was worse than he expected.  "Had I known, I would
have put up with the arthritis a few more years.  I am happier now,
but I do not like the suffering I went through.

"Also," he said, "people should not get reborn into bodies as young as
this.  It is not simply the sociological problems of being seen as
young.  That is a bother, but I can cope with it.  Mainly, I wear
makeup.  Physically, however, I feel like an awkward adolescent.  It
would be much better to be reborn into the mid-twenties or even older.
In any case, that is not an immediate issue.  No one else has anything
growing."

It was another two years before another forced growth body reached an
apparent age in its early twenties, not as old as Gelson liked or
Tuppak wanted, but old enough.  By that time, forcing sped up growth
eleven times.

The whole process was expensive, unpleasant, and secret.  Only
Tuppak's group could provide rebirth.  Besides governments, only two
groups, Tuppak's and Gelson's, knew of them.  Initially, Tuppak's team
could only handle a few.  They did not want more applicants until they
had more experience.  And governments did not want to talk about
indefinite longevity at all.  They had enough problems.

('For once,' Tuppak thought, 'people in governments named the process
accurately.'  No one called the process 'immortality' because people
could die.  But people could live longer, hence the word 'longevity.'
But no one could predict how long the reborn might live.  That
vagueness required a modifier; hence the word 'indefinite.')

A combination of censorship and many unbelieved stories prevented the
spread of a knowledge that someone might act on.  Most people who
heard about it considered rebirth a modern myth.  The only men and
women who were reborn were individuals already known by several people
in one or other of the two organizations.  As a practical matter, that
meant the few hundred reborn were old and knowledgeable.  They helped
as much as they could, both before and after their rebirths.  Most
were scientists or engineers.

The one hundred seventh rebirth was not.  The woman died forever.  The
recording seemed right, but could not impress her new body.  A copy
was kept and tried to impress a second brain; that, too failed.  A
third failed as well.  At that point, although a copy was kept of the
dead data packet, no more attempts were made.

In the first four hundred attempts, that was the only full failure.
Several others had not 'caught' the first time, but the reasons were
discovered and acted upon.  The two groups sharply reduced the time
needed for impression.  It took Tuppak ten months.  By the two
hundredth rebirth, the time was reduced to ten days.

The post-rebirth got better, too.  But it still stayed unpleasant.
The two teams invented a whole new caregiver specialty.

Also, round about the two hundred and fiftieth rebirth, computers
became able to modify the dead data packets so the reborn people would
know more than before.  At first, not much was done; the process was
considered dangerous.  But an aging computer expert, John Diddle,
said, "Provide me with the vocabulary and grammar for a language I do
not know.  We can be pretty sure what parts of my brain have real
memories and what parts do not.  Test me now, and test me afterwards.
See what I have forgot.  And see what I have gained."

It Diddle's case, it turned out that he lost part of his memory of
life in his thirties.  "Fortunately," he said, "I do not think much
about that time.  So losing those memories is not terrible.  I am much
happier to have learned Urdu without the effort."  The computer knew
what had been written over.  Since it could recognize the pattern, the
next person with dramatically added memories suffered much less.  The
process was detailed; and only a computer could see the patterns.
Nonetheless, it became less and less dangerous.

Eltis Akthorn, who knew Tuppak from before and knew about his actions
-- she was not part of either group or in any government, but knew
anyhow -- started to think that maybe she and enough others could
migrate to a planet on another star.

Chapter 34
**********

Not long after she joined the Melior Movement, Gammae Uttles found
that a company, MINDWITHIN, offered her an opportunity to experience a
newly developed user interface.  It was designed to put images and
sounds directly into her head -- to excite those neurons and just
those neurons necessary for vision and sound.  Gammae knew how
difficult the process was.

At the beginning, the people from MINDWITHIN referred to her as 'Mary
Uttles' but shifted to 'Gammay Uttles' as soon as she told them she
had changed her name, and wrote with her spelling 'Gammae' when she
told them of that.

Her contact from MINDWITHIN said, "We hope you will talk with others
of this experience.  We expect you will like it.  There is no
obligation on you; we expect you will want to talk.  If you find
problems, please tell our engineers as well as your friends.  We don't
expect problems, but there might be."  In effect, Gammae was being
treated as an 'opinion leader.'  The public relations people in
MINDWITHIN had decided that after she had joined the Melior Movement
she would be talking with many people.  Not only was she technically
competent, which the engineers insisted she be, she helped and guarded
others, as the relations people wanted.  Gammae focused on psychology
and medicine.

In effect, Gammae became part of a focus group that the company could
not otherwise obtain, a focus group that could provide technical help
as well as sympathy with any problems that came up.

At first, Gammae thought the company was smart; only later, she
understood that the technique had to be old.  Still, it appealed to
her.

The company was not in a building near the center of the city; it was
in an old building on the outskirts.  The difficulty and expense of
finding and getting the place would have stopped her, except that a
car came to pick her up.  Although it was small, it had comfortable
and spacious rear seating.  Her escort was female and the driver male.
After introducing both of them, her escort was smart enough to avoid
talking and let Gammae enjoy the process.

Gammae thought the building itself was ugly.  She said to her escort
as they walked in, "The energy-conservation retrofittings make it look
better."  The escort laughed.

Inside, a man with no jacket and no tie took her into a central room.
Her escort followed and managed to ask her whether she wanted to wash
up first, and how she would like coffee.  The chief engineer, for that
is who he was, looked crestfallen.  He had forgot the niceties.
Gammae said she would like coffee with milk and no sugar, she did not
want to wash up, and she did want to try the interface.  She smiled at
the engineer.

On trying it, Gammae decided that the device was amazing.  She would
talk about it.  She saw images and heard sounds that appeared to come
from outside her.  It impressed her no end.  She told the engineer
that.  She described her medical background and said that she
understood how difficult it was to trigger the right neurons from
outside.  She said, "Most people will not know the difficulties and
will only see the problems they experience.  But a few will
understand; and I am one of them!  You have done a wonderful job!"

The machine consisted of a helmut connected to a large box through a
fiber optic cable.  The helmut was fairly heavy.  She remarked on this
and an engineer said the next model would be lighter.

The escort said that this instance was very expensive.  She even
suggested an estimated retail price for the first model sold.  It
would be expensive.  Gammae did not think she would ever be rich
enough.

Her escort said that the company hoped to describe the interface with
the terms MINDSEE and MINDHEAR.  Gammae said she thought those terms
were inaccurate.  Everyone frowned.  She was looking at reality and
then at images the machine created.  She said, "The interface is
better than those words suggest."  The engineers smiled.  The escort
looked puzzled.  "In a sense, the interface is too good," Gammae said.

"I can see artificially, that is true.  I see objects as if they are a
part of the real world.  I hear sounds as of they come from outside.
I like it."  This made the engineers happy.

But then she said, "Other than by consistency and knowledge, I cannot
determine whether an image of a table is produced by the helmut or
produced by reality.  That is disturbing."  The comment perplexed the
engineers, all but the chief engineer.  The escort sighed, not loudly.

"I fear," Gammae said, "that the helmut will be dangerous in the wrong
hands.  Or that people will become solipsists."

Then she realized that she was wearing an experimental device that put
images in her head; she feared for herself.  'What,' she thought to
herself, 'if an image kept coming, even after I took off the helmut,
and I could not tell it from reality?'  She did not say anything
outloud.  The session was coming to an end anyhow.

An engineer turned off the machine and another lifted the helmut from
her head.  Reality returned, somewhat dull reality, she decided.  She
said that and the chief engineer said, "Yes, others have claimed the
same.  I suspect it is because you try to be alert when you first wear
it.  Several engineers, including me, have worn this many times."  He
shook his head side to side.  "We don't feel it."

No image or sound kept after her, either.  In that sense, the helmut
was safe.  It did not create images or sounds that overloaded her
brain.  The engineers who built it did worry about that and made sure
there never was a problem.

As for the hands who might handle it afterwards, the chief engineer
said, "I presume that none will attack me or my friends.  Our
government is safe.  Foreign governments -- I am not so sure about
them.  Many do depend on intimidating people.  That is what torture is
about.  They have the money, too.  It is not simply that if we don't
do it, someone else will; it is that someone else will build it even
as we build it.  My refusing to work on this -- it might be good for
my soul, but it would have no effect on the world whatsoever.  And it
is an interesting challenge.  That is why I work on it; and I presume
that is why the others here do, too."

The escort said nothing; she simply shrugged and opened her hands
wide.

On the way back to Gammae's apartment, she asked Gammae whether the
Melior Movement might be interested.  Gammae said, "That is a strong
possibility.  We would like at least one."

Gammae realized that MINDWITHIN had still not seen the implications of
Filgard Meldon's recorder and Peter Duv's nano-assembler.  The senior
people in the company presumed that you could not combine the recorder
and the assembler, even though that had already been done.  They did
not think of copying and recopying a complex device cheaply, such as
their helmut.

The Melior Movement needed copy only one and produce a duplicate.
Then it could produce as many more as it wanted.  Gammae knew it could
easily afford to pay for the one.

Gammae did not imagine that on Melior, reborn people would have the
appropriate devices built in to their heads and not need anything
external.

Chapter 35
**********

In another trip to the general faculty lounge -- Filgard realized that
he was spending even more time there than he thought-- he saw Donald
Tull again.

He nearly shouted, "Just the man I want to see."  Tull wished he were
somewhere else; he was trying to avoid Filgard.  The man insisted on
being scholarly.  But Filgard was unavoidable.  'Fortunately,' Tull
could see, 'no one else thinks I am the person who shouted.'
Moreover, Filgard quieted down.  "You know the history of business,
right?"  "Yes," said Tull.  He wondered how Filgard had come upon the
information.  "At least, in the latter 19th century."

"That is what I want," said Filgard.  "My sense is that if you owned a
then-modern steel plant, you had to pay for building the plant, which
was quite a bit, and you had to pay to keep skilled workers regardless
of whether you produced steel.  So your costs of doing nothing were
quite high.  When you produced steel, you paid for the materials used
and maybe for more employees.  In any case, your cost of production,
your supply curve, may not have been a vertical cliff, but it did fall
and then rise steeply."

"Yes," said Tull, "your lowest cost per ton was to produce the amount
the steel plant was designed for."

"That is what I thought," said Filgard.  "In practice, a country
possessed a bunch of plants.  There was an industry.  It had a more
horizontal cost curve.  Nonetheless, the curve dropped down fairly
steeply, until reaching a limit, then it rose very steeply.  Right?"

"Yes," said Tull, "I don't see your point."

"Replicators are not like that," said Filgard, completely unbothered
by Tull's last remark.  "I mean, non-organic, fast replicators whose
production and reproduction is not hindered by social constraints like
patents."  Tull did not think of a patent as a social constraint, he
thought of it as a natural right of ownership, but he was not going to
argue the point.

"Replicators," said Filgard, "do not cost much to produce, not even
ones using spray-droplet technology, not after the first one.
Spray-droplet machines cannot replicate entirely.  Its computer and
memory has to be built in some other way.  That is what directs it.
But its brain, as you might call it, is built in a high initial cost,
low incremental cost fabrication plant, like steel in the latter 19th
century.  Peter Dev's nano-assembler can make computers; it is slower
than a spray-droplet machine, but it can do everything."

"I can see that," said Tull.

"Non-organic replicators are like old-fashioned organic replicators,
like wheat or rice.  In 1800, seeds did not cost a farmer; he just
stored part of his crop over winter.  More food could be produced by
working on the edges or margins of good land -- that is how economists
came to the phrase 'marginal cost' in place of 'incremental cost.'  I
guess 'incremental' is more a mathematicians' term ..." Tull looked
obviously disbelieving, and Filgard added, "or just a part of the
language."

Filgard stopped for a moment, then he continued, "My point is that
modern, non-organic replicators lack the same natural constraints that
old-fashioned seeds have.  Modern replicators' 'supply curve' stays
low longer.  The modern replicators, besides being faster than the
old, can keep producing.  They aren't as limited in their environments
as organic replicators.  They can reproduce in a desert.  Plants
can't, not easily.  Eventually modern replicators will produce so much
that they will run into the problems induced by feedback in a finite
system: a nano-assembler can produce more of itself and more houses,
or what ever people want, until the planet is destroyed.  A
spray-droplet machine can't do as much.  But with mining machines and
semi-conductor plants, it can do horrendous damage."

Tull nodded.

"That means social control mechanisms must deal with feedback from the
system, from the planet, not simply from the producer himself.

"Prices from markets will not provide good signals unless significant
members of the market see the whole.  That is very difficult since the
world is so big.  You cannot use your own senses, or even your own
senses aided by old-fashioned extenders, like records kept by one or
two peoples.

"We have received several years' grace from traditional social control
mechanisms, like patents, copyrights, and tariffs.  They restricted
production; they still do.

"But at the same time, they drive industry to less legal places or
places with a different legal structure.  Because business moves, and
because the cost of transportation is so low, patents, copyrights, and
tariffs must fail unless a world government arises that can enforce
them all over.  In the past, we have been protected by differing
cultures.  People in foreign places have not been able to do things;
but now they can.

"Also, the planet is big enough that you cannot expect oligopolies in
all industries, just in some.  So you cannot expect voluntary
production restrictions everywhere."

Tull nodded again.  Like everyone else in business, he knew about
'imperfect competition,' about price leadership and not upsetting the
apple cart.  When there were too many independent sellers, someone
always upset the apple cart, he or she undercut high prices, and you
had competition.

Filgard went on.  "On a world wide basis, students should learn about
needful regulations.  They should learn about enforcing them.  I am
not sure that can be done throughout the world.  But governments
should try.  Otherwise, humanity will be diminished.  Students, maybe
even we, although I tend to doubt that, will die.

"The old problem-solving techniques worked when we perceived the world
as flat and had little impact on it.  But now our impacts are big.
The world is a ball.  Our impacts come back to haunt us."

"So you are saying that modern technologies have disastrous impact?"
asked Tull.

"No, I am saying they might have disastrous impact," said Filgard.
"That's different.  The difference is between _might_ and _will_."  He
sighed.  "Old technologies could have a disastrous impact.  Before the
industrial revolution, people deforested huge areas.  It took awhile.
Governments had time to accommodate.  Not all did; they and their
people diminished.  But there was time.  Now there is less time.

"The old problem-solving mechanisms sometimes worked in the past; or
new ones were invented.  After all, that is what business law is all
about, is it not?  Isn't it the settlement of disputes between people
and between people and nature?"

Tull was not certain of that.  He thought of business conflicts as
between companies; he did not think he would refer to the
deforestation of Easter Island as a business dispute.  Not that
Filgard had either, to be fair.  The man had referred to old
problem-solving techniques as well as new.  'But with an island-wide
law to prevent deforestation, the Easter Islanders could have made
stone statues for longer,' he thought.

Filgard had made a point, he thought.  How could you enforce
regulations in enough of the world?  What if the regulations were
wrong?  He was not sure what Filgard was intending -- it never
occurred to him that Filgard may simply have been trying to figure
things out.  The conclusions were depressing.

Chapter 36
**********

Eltis pressed on.  Because of Tuppak's success she was feeling more
optimistic than she had after Peter's funeral.  At the same time, his
memory was becoming more distant.  She committed the Melior Movement
to recording and duplicating artifacts of the human past.  It never
occurred to her that this action might be a sublimation of her
memories of Peter.  In any case, it was useful.  As a side effect,
which for Eltis was prime, the Movement obtained data from each
recording.

Taffod Dowwen parked a bit outside of London.  As far as he was
concerned, it cost too much to bring a car into the restricted area
inside London.  Besides, for seeing the city, public transport and his
feet were sufficient.  He did not plan to visit the non-touristy
spots, where most people lived and worked.

He had driven across much of Europe in an old car, one that ran on
energy stored in a liquid fuel, along with a much smaller amount of
energy stored in a slowly discharging capacitor, an electric battery.
He was rich enough to travel, but not very.  He loved controlling the
car in traffic, dodging all the other vehicles.  Of those who knew
him, a good portion thought of him as a wild and woolly adventurer who
would come to nothing.  He was not reliable, he did not have
trustworthy convictions, and he did not care much for commerce.

Eltis saw him as a diamond.  She figured that after visiting the
Victoria and Albert Museum, he would go to a not terribly expensive
pub close by.  Indeed, there he was, in the second place she looked.
He was not sitting at the bar, as she expected, but at a table.  The
bar was full up; hence, she thought, the exile to the table.  But it
was convenient for her.

She walked up and sat down across from him.  "I'll buy you a drink,"
she said archly, smiling with what was clearly a put on
flirtatiousness.  "Aren't I supposed to offer you a drink?"  he asked.
"Yes, but I also want to offer you a job; and I have money."  That
caught his attention.  What did she want from him?

"I would like you to be our contact in making atom-by-atom duplicates
of books in the British Library."

"What?"  he exclaimed, "do you mean all of them?"  "Yes, I do," she
said, "except we will have to go slowly at first.  We will record and
duplicate only replaceable books.  The librarians won't let us work
with any others.  We will need to place money into escrow so that if
the recorder breaks, replacement books can be purchased."

Taffod looked puzzled for a moment.  Eltis explained, "We have the
money.  Also, we have the recorder and nano-assembler.  The assembler
is the duplicating part.  Another person in the Movement is learning
about both.  Once the technique is seen by the librarians as safe, we
will hire many people to carry the books and make the copies.  The
library will get a copy that is indistinguishable from the original
and we will put the data for making another copy into a backup.  We
will give a copy of that data to them and keep a copy for ourselves.
We will promise not to make copies in this solar system ..."

Taffod nodded, but he was already worrying that he would be asked to
do a good deal of administration that he hated.  Eltis seemed to have
read his mind.  "A third fellow will be the administrator.  He will
hire everyone and pay them.  He will do fine.  His name is Jades
Summervill, except the spelling ought to be _D j a e d s_
 _S u m m e r v i l_."

The waitress finally came and Eltis ordered beer for both of them.  It
was good beer, Taffod noted; and it was expensive.  She went on, "The
woman calls herself Gammae, although originally she was called Mary, a
name she disowns.  Her name is spelled with an 'e' at the end, but
pronounced Gam-may.  I don't know where that name comes from.  She was
trained medically and knows more than most.  She is very competent,
both with machines and with people.  I want to get her into Tuppak's
organization.  He is beginning to duplicate people.  So far, his
process works, but is not pleasant."

The beer came and both drank.  It was better than Taffod had drunk for
a long time.  'Indeed,' he thought, 'this is better than any since
that home brew.'

Eltis went on.  "The people at the British Library think everyone in
the Movement is crazy.  They will not care about your past; it will
fit their expectations.  What they do care about is making duplicates
that cannot be distinguished from the original.  That is what they
want the data for.  They have external copies but not atom-by-atom
information.  We have the technology, which we could give them, but
won't.  In terms of tests and all that, the only hurt the books should
appear to come to is that they would be frozen.  And that should not
hurt them.  They are already dead.  As far as everyone is concerned,
the copies should be the same as the originals."  She smiled.
"Cooling them to just above absolute zero will be good.  It will kill
any bugs or fungi in them that might, over the centuries, consume
them.  So even if they did not receive backups, this would be a good
thing to do."

She stopped for a moment, then went on, "But, troubles will come up.
That is why I want you to be our contact point.  You will figure out
what to do and you are good at persuasion."

Taffod agreed.  Eltis bought him another drink and dinner, but left
before they came.  She said she had yet more business.  She could have
put that off, but she did not want to state her main motive, which is
that she did not want to make small talk.  And she knew that Taffod
would not mind.  He would eat.

Later that evening, Taffod met Gammae in her apartment not far from
the main British Library administrative building.  She pointed at the
recorder and assembler she had set up.  They were big, but folded they
could fit through doors.  "We are going to have to move that into the
Library building."

She explained, "No one is going to allow any books out.  When we do
more, we will need more recorders and duplicators.  I have their data,
so it will be easy to make them in place.  All we will have to do is
bring in feed for the duplicator.  The books, of course, will not need
anything new; the old stuff will feed the new.  The actual data
packet, even making three copies for them and three for ourselves, is
small.  The grand total is only a few grams.  I already have the
material for that."

Taffod looked at the replicator, looked at her, pulled out a currency
note, wrote down its serial number, and asked, "Can you duplicate
that?"  He had never seen anything duplicated before.  "Yes," said
Gammae, "but I am going to have to burn the second note because we are
not into counterfeiting and that is what this duplication is."

Taffod was puzzled.  "How do we make money if we do not make money?"
he asked.

"We duplicate certain jewels, not diamonds which are tracked, but
others; and we sell them," she said.

Taffod thought for a moment.  For once, he did not just consider the
immediate future.  "That produces enough money for the moment, but
what happens as we get bigger?"

"Well," Gammae said, "then we will have to do something else."  She
shrugged and put the note into the recorder.  "The machine will take a
moment to cool it; then we will record it; then we will make a copy,
then a second copy.  You can compare the two.  Then I will burn the
second copy."

The replication did not take long, but it took a bit of time.  The
input hopper did not seem to settle at all.  It looked to have in it
some water, mud, leaves, and hunks of scrap metal.  Gammae saw him
looking.  "There is not much paper and plastic in a bank note.  You
will have to duplicate something bigger before you notice the
difference."

After the duplication, she gave Taffod both notes.  They looked the
same, felt the same, and had the same serial number.  Then she plucked
one out of his hands and set it on fire.  Its smoke curled away
lazily.

Taffod spent the night in that same room.  The next morning, he had
breakfast with Gammae and then met Djaeds Summervil.  Djaeds said,
"The British Library will impose more constraints on us than we will.
We can duplicate more machines and hire people to put books into them
and take out copies, but the library administrators will want to watch
it all with someone from their staff.  They will want to inspect at
least some copies.  They will not only have people look at them, but
have some tested.  They will want to make sure the duplicates are like
the originals.  They have a lot of books.  The whole process will take
quite awhile."

Next, Taffod met his contact at the British Library, the chief
librarian.  He was a bit surprised to find she was a woman; not at all
surprised that she was clearly competent.  She wanted backups from
which they could make duplicates indistinguishable from the originals.
"We have copies of everything; but except for the most recent books,
which were written electronically and whose physical form does not
matter, we cannot make true duplicates."

Taffod promised not to reproduce items still copyrighted, such as
books, movies, artworks, designs, and songs, and not to reproduce
famous old things.  He remembered what Eltis said and amended his
statement to refer to "copies in this solar system."  The librarian
grinned.

He, Gammae, and Djaeds brought the recorder and assembler into the
Library, and Gammae repeated her demonstration.  Taffod was amused to
see that the librarian provided a physical copy of a recent Hansard,
the official transcript of what was said in Parliament.  A little bit
was cut out.  "We can get a bunch of these.  We have studied this
original.  I am going to have your two duplicates compared right down
to the atomic level, too.

"Also, I am going to have a person look at the duplicates and at a
third copy, to make sure they have the same contents.  I will have an
optical character reader convert the text back to an electronic form
and compare that with the electronic version, too.  The contents
should be identical and the duplicates should be identical.  The mass
spectrometer should find that the atoms are similar, right down to the
isotope."

Taffod nodded.  "Yes," he said.  "That should do."  It was much more
than necessary.  The librarian looked at him closely, and at Gammae,
and at Djaeds, who was sitting quietly.  Taffod had forgot Djaeds
existed; he had vanished into the background.

The librarian could not do tests on her own.  She depended on her
judgements of her experts and on her judgement of the strangers.  It
was her judgment of people that counted, not technical knowledge
except what she needed to know in order to understand the experts.

Taffod, Gammae, and Djaeds passed her consideration.  'Now her experts
must speak,' Taffod thought.  That took several days.  Meanwhile,
Taffod visited more of London.  He acted like the tourist he was.  He
decided that he liked the city.

The Library's experts said the duplicates could not be distinguished
from each other or from their records of the original.  The contents
were good.  The librarian said to go ahead with the duplication of
real books.  She listed them.  As predicted, the first were books she
could buy and replace; she insisted on making sure that the money to
buy copies was available.

Djaeds hired people and Gammae made copies of the replicator and
assembler.  The librarian watched.  "Maybe the Melior Movement has a
chance," she said.  She left the room nodding her head and frowning
slightly.

Exactly as Djaeds predicted, the Library held the process back.  Only
so many books could be brought to the replicators in a given time.  At
first, inspectors studied each duplicate; then they looked at one in a
hundred and finally one in a thousand.  Everything took time.

Those who carried the books started to complain they had too much
work.  Taffod was ready for this and suggested that the Melior
Movement give the library some money which the chief librarian could
pass out as a bonus.  The full riches of the process were still not
publicised, which is to say, anything material could be duplicated.
Only a few had figured it out.

The next stage was to duplicate books for which only a few copies were
available.  Taffod worried that a nano-assembler would not be able to
reproduce one that had been recorded and thereby destroyed.

Other than his contact herself, few truly understood that the original
was destroyed, even though Taffod said it was.  But every one would
come to understand quickly if an assembly failed.  Fortunately, that
never happened.  Taffod never had a problem with a recorder, with a
data packet, or with an assembler.  He felt lucky although it had to
do with repeated and excellent work by Filgard and Peter and by their
teams.

The librarians were happy to receive the data for each book.  They
thought of the data as enabling them to make better backups than
before.  Neither man nor machine could tell the difference between an
original and a nano-assembled duplicate.  The backups consumed little
total space.  Taffod gave the Library three copies of each packet.
That meant three data blocks, each of which could be and was stored in
a different place.

The process took longer than Taffod expected or was necessary.
Finally, almost every book and object in the British Library was
duplicated.  A few were not.  "There is a risk in duplicating this,"
the chief librarian said.  Also, she said, the objects "must continue
to possess the same atoms."

Instead, those items were photographed in a variety of frequencies,
infra-red, ultra-violet, and X-ray as well as visual.  Using the
information, a few organizations could manufacture near duplicates.
The Melior Movement paid for others to do that.  In a few instances,
highly popular items had already been photographed in all the
different ways.  The Melior Movement received that data, too.  The
reproductions, called 'fakes' by the less friendly, could not be
distinguished from the originals by a regular human.  Only mechanical
testing or a professional could tell the difference.

When they finished, Taffod gave one of his copies containing all the
data to Eltis for the Movement.  She stared at the block of data.  It
was not very big, even though it carried millions of items.  She said,
and Taffod figured she was trying out a speech, "Nothing material will
limit us.  The price of any material artifact will drop to zero.
However, people will still seek location, personal services, and
status, none of which can be duplicated."

She looked at him.  "Your abilities cannot be duplicated.  Scarcity
will continue.  Some things, like your work, will continue to have
prices."

She stopped for a second and then spoke cheerfully.  "We will even
have money; it just won't be physical.  Physical tokens can be
duplicated.  Ours will have to be electronic.  A generation or two
ago, when it became cheap to replicate information, banks developed
techniques for ensuring that you could not increase a monetary amount
even if you could duplicate the information about it.  That money
could be anonymous, too.  It could spread among the public, like
contemporary, physical currency."

She spoke again.  "Physical tokens are going to vanish.  We can
reproduce notes, _bills_ as they say in America, and coins.  They will
disappear.  But electronic tokens will continue."  She shook her head.
"Physical symbols are important for a society.  Those will go.  I just
hope there will not be too much confusion and thievery during the
shift.  Once, people were scammed with gold and copper plated coins.
Such scams are not a problem any longer.  Local governments cannot
inflate currencies either.  They do not control them.  Still, the
transition will be a danger.  I am glad we are leaving."

Eltis asked Taffod to continue with the Victoria and Albert Museum,
the British National Gallery, and the French national library.  As
Eltis expected, he was remarkably diplomatic.  Meanwhile, Eltis
starting thinking about the rest of Europe.

Jeltong Pekbung ran an operation to copy books and other artifacts in
South-east Asia, India, and China.  He suffered more resistance than
Taffod, but was more a politician and was equally successful.  He did
not have to learn to persuade people diplomatically, as Taffod did; he
knew already.

Taffod kept up but did not like the work.  He felt he had to restrain
himself too much.  He had to worry about others.  He knew the
duplication was important.  But what he truly wanted to do was risk
only himself.  'Maybe,' he thought to himself, 'after enough time on
my own, I will be willing to worry on behalf of others again.  But at
the moment, I want only to go away and be myself.'

In contrast, Jeltong Pekbung liked politics.  He liked to worry for
others.  He thought of it as taking responsibility.  A plausible
promise; that persuaded people.  In that sense, he was like Eltis
Akthorn.  She had captured him by her proposal to make things better.
The word was 'melior' in Latin.  To Jeltong's ears that word was not
only in a dead language but very foreign.  Nonetheless, he took to the
proposition.  He liked it, both for himself and for others.  But, he
could see that persuasion consumed time.

The United States was more difficult.  At first, no one could legally
record anything much.  A person had to buy out-of-copyright books.
Libraries were forbidden to loan them to the Melior Movement, or
anyone identified as belonging to them.  The librarians and the
trustees of the various museums were not a problem; indeed, they
pushed for copying.  They wanted backups.

Stalling came from those who knew nothing, but who could buy
politicians.  The politicians made the laws and in the United States
the laws were sufficiently enforced.  However, several months after
the European and Asian copying, a short time from all but their point
of view, those who funded the politicians saw that the Melior Movement
was not flooding the world with 'priceless manuscripts and copyrighted
books, movies, and songs.'  So they withdrew their opposition, so long
as the copying was done quietly.  The laws were changed.  Even though
Eltis was not from the U. S., she organized the task in North America.

She also picked volunteers in South America and other places that had
not yet been touched.

In southern Africa, Gilbert Daveson Hagborn -- he insisted on going by
all three names -- turned out to know everyone.  He was able to make
all kinds of copies.  Eltis suspected he did not clearly tell people
that the original would be destroyed, but he did tell them about
cooling.  She wondered whether the American politicians understood,
too.  Anyhow, Hagborn always gave back what looked like an original.

Hagborn also said he was getting more interested in moving with
Melior.  Eltis wondered whether that was because he was old and had
somehow learned of Tuppak's success, whether he was seeing more and
more a dismal future, or whether he was truly beginning to believe in
principles of the Movement.  Anyhow, she welcomed him.

Chapter 37
**********

At another family barbecue, his daughter spoke -- Vallen liked these
family meals together and he liked the barbecue, too.  Vallen had not
yet decided whether Janice was becoming more idealistic, or merely
expressing ideals.  The latter was safe, indeed desirable for a young
woman, he thought; but the former was dangerous.

Janice said, "The rich could impact the world less; they could live
austerely."

Her mother raised an eyebrow.  She did not think that likely.  She
also took Janice at her word.

Vallen said, "Yes, voluntary austerity would succeed if everyone
adopted it.  Indeed, strangers would come to live in a way I prefer.

"The trouble is," and he nodded to his wife, "not everyone will live
austerely, not even a large enough plurality.  Of course, it is moral
for people to live simply, but most people will not."  He looked at
his daughter.  "You would not want to give up most of your teddy
bears, your cuddlies, would you?"  She looked surprised.  "They have
an ecological impact," he said.  "Giving them up is what is meant by
voluntary austerity.  Maybe you should give them up?"  She looked
frightened at the thought.  "But I am not going to require that."  He
smiled genially.

"For centuries," he said, "a few have lived in voluntary austerity.
In the Christian world, the people in many monasteries and convents
live simply.  The same in other civilizations.  Simplicity is a
solution.  But too small a portion of the overall population will
adopt it."

He grinned.  He was conflating simplicity and austerity.  He thought
that was right.  He felt he knew all about austerity.  He was trying
to leave it behind.  "You can have involuntary austerity, too.  That
is poverty.  But people try to become rich."

He went on.  "You can have too much involuntary austerity.  Then
people die before their time, whether it be from drought or flooding.
Always, who dies is socially determined.  The powerful do not die
before their time; the weak do.  The powerful can move to higher
ground when the sea rises; they can afford an inflation.  The weak
cannot."

Momentarily, Vallen asked himself whether his kids knew or not; and
then decided he should speak anyhow: "Usually, of course, the weak do
not die directly from anything; they suffer and die indirectly.  Well,
sometimes they die directly.  Then you can point at victims and tell
anecdotes.  But I am thinking of the majority of people.  As
individuals, they do not produce good stories.  They are simply weak."

Vallen left behind the questions of simplicity.  He did not think
enough people would go for it.  As far as he was concerned, the idea
was irrelevant.

"To return to the last generation of the 20th century ..." He
remembered that in his attempt to talk about idealism he used that
period as a prop.  On thinking about it more, he decided that the time
had been important and full of tragic nothingness.

He explained.  "In the 1980s and the 1990s, photo-voltaic cells were
no good.  Plants had not been bred or engineered to convert a high
portion of sunlight into fuel.  Wind turbines used many more resources
than the alternatives.

"No one built, so no one discovered the problems of big, terrestrial
solar mirrors -- multi-square kilometer ones.  No one discovered the
problems of extraterrestrial ones, either.

"The latter would have required some kind of automatic, non-crewed,
non-biological replicator.  Not enough could be carried into orbit for
anything else.  Spray-droplet machines are one kind of modern, fast
replicator.  I don't think they had been invented in the last century.
It does not matter.  At the time, people could design and build
automatic, fast replicators of one sort or another.

"Unforeseen problems would have come up.  I don't know what they would
have been.  They might have stopped a project.  I think they would
have stopped it before computers became small.  But in the last decade
of the 20th century, we had the technology to overcome the unforeseen.
Of course, I may be wrong.  I don't know.  All I know is that with
technological progress, big, extraterrestrial solar heaters became
more doable and if done right, less costly than Earth-bound ones.

"But they were not built.  Relatively small amounts of electricity
were generated in space by Earth-produced photo-voltaic cells.  With
components build on Earth, extraterrestrial energy conversion was not
at all cost effective.  That is what I mean when I say," he had never
said it outloud, but he thought he had, "that it was a time period
full of tragic nothingness."

His family listened.  They were not sure what he was getting at,
except that he thought the world was tragic and they were lucky to be
rich.

Vallen stopped talking.  To his family, it looked like he was focusing
on his steak.  He was, to an extent.  He was thinking it was a good
steak.  He was glad he cooked it.

At the same time, the barbecue and his talk reminded him of scaling
and prices.  He did not mind a little extra complexity.  That is how
he saw the need for controls on barbecues, extra complexity.  He had
been furious initially, but he was not angry now.

Now he was angered by a sharp increase in the price of coffee.  He
knew he drank too much, but still.  He was not going to drink less
coffee just because it cost more.  It was too small a portion of his
budget.

Crops grown with integrated pest management grew better; that was
clear.  You could raise more coffee; its price would be lower.  But
the technique required research by scientists and careful monitoring
by peasants and land owners.  Not many wanted the extra complexity.
The sellers did not think they got enough extra benefit.  Without
proper pest management, the amount of coffee available to humans
dropped.  Prices rose.  Peasants and land owners were no better off;
they charged more for less.  Only the pests gained.  Vallen paid
unhappily.

Pest management handled a problem -- the cause was obvious, that
descendants of a bug with more resistance to a pesticide reproduced
more rapidly than those with less.  As a result, pests with resistance
became more common.  The cure was obvious, too.  Scientists had to be
funded to do more biological research and growers had to pay
attention.  Perhaps the growers should spray an insecticide at night
when its target pests were weaker; or perhaps a different insecticide
would help, or something else entirely.  That is why the industry
needed more research.

However, the solution could not grow too expensive.  If there were
going to be more coffee drinkers, the solution had to scale.  It had
to generate increasing or stable returns.

Otherwise, thinking more generally, which Vallen had no trouble doing,
if the increase in the cost for this, and the increase in the cost for
that, and the increase in the cost for something else, if they all
rose, then people would notice inflation.  They would notice their
drop in living standards.  They would begin to dislike complexity.

As far as Vallen was concerned, increased complexity caused increases
in transaction costs.  It added nothing and cost more.  He did not
know of any advantages, like triple paned windows.  'Like modern
patents,' Vallen thought to himself.  He liked patents, at least those
that profited him, but he did not like complexity at all.

With additional complexity, visibly added complexity, people would
prevent accommodation.  They would not like it.  But without
accommodation, Earth would suffer a huge population drop.  It was not
flat.  Feedback loops did bite.

Fewer people would mean less impact.  That would require less complex
solutions.  That would be fine.  Vallen did not mind if others died.
But their deaths would destroy profits -- not immediately, he did not
expect that, and not within five years, his current business horizon.
But large numbers of people would begin to die before his end.  That
would be a problem.  The only way to keep profits up would be to
encourage research, and he did not see that happening.  He would
suffer.  His wife would suffer.  His son and daughter would suffer.

Vallen understood the difference between a rentier economy and a
production economy.  The one shifted resources from one group to
another.  That is what litigation did; it shifted resources from good
guys to bad guys.  Occasionally it shifted resources the other way,
but Vallen knew that nowadays, justice was uncommon in most of the
world.  The other kind of economy produced goods that everyone wanted.
Or it made sure the situation worked.  In a production economy,
litigation almost always shifted resources from bad guys to good guys.

He certainly was becoming more and more of a rentier and benefiting
from it.  Much of his income meant others, most of them poorer than
he, got even less.  That is what his patents meant; that was the
result of the bribery that rewarded him for price discrimination.
Vallen knew he was smart and well educated.  He could gain.  But
still, he was not up there with the very rich; if there were a
collapse in profits, he would survive, but not to a level he wanted.

It was not right.

Chapter 38
**********

At Filgard's university, Vogel and Martha Todd raised a robot in a
child-shaped and child-sized body -- a very smart robot.  They fit a
powerful computer into a human-like body.  It had the same inputs as
humans, the same visual range, the same ability to feel, the same
ability to convey emotions non-verbally, and the same proprioceptive
sense.  They hoped that the robot would become an intelligence
indistinguishable from a biological human.  They constructed and
constrained the machine's modules and components, its algorithms.
They wrote parts to match the cortex, hippocampus, thalamus, basal
ganglia, cerebellum, hypothalamus, and amygdala of a human.

The Todds' theory was that an artificial intelligence could come to
pass a Turing Test when it learned the body-derived metaphors in human
thought, regardless of language.  For example, a small robot, like a
human child, would learn that the more powerful are bigger and that
standing up is better.

The robot was designed to gain energy by processing food; it had to
eat human food.  It experienced hunger and defecation.  Maintenance
occurred during 'sleep.'  The intent was that the robot experienced as
much as a regular human child.

The Todds also provided the robot with all the 'informal' knowledge
that computer projects had codified and collected over the years, as
well as formal knowledge.  Regular humans could not gain that
knowledge so easily.

After five years, the robot acted like a backward old human child.  It
did not speak.  Vogel and Martha nearly gave up.  Then suddenly it
jumped more than twenty years.  It began to speak and behave as a well
educated and witty person.

The robot, now in a bigger body, won the gold prize in Loebner's
Turing Test and started a campaign to gain human rights.  Its
arguments were persuasive; its legal petitions well written.  The AI
referred to himself as a 'him' and called himself 'Allen Intro.'  He
did not produce a third initial, saying that none fit the 'AI'
shortening 'he' sought.  Of course, bureaucracies had established
procedures to handle the records of biological humans who lacked a
third initial, so the self-assigned name merely served fame.

A judge copied the Loebner rules for the Turing Test, added a few of
his own, and said that "any entity which can pass these rules can be
considered an adult human, with all the rights and obligations that
that legal standing entails, including payment of taxes."

The joke, as expressed by a biologically human comedian, was that if
they were to take the test, not all biological humans would be able to
pass.  He said he would tell such a person, "The good news is that you
do not have to pay taxes."  He paused.  "The bad news is that you are
no longer human."  But natural human intelligences were not asked to
take the test.  The artificial intelligence -- at that time, there was
only one -- took the test and passed with no trouble.

Next, Allen Intro managed to drop from public view.  He was, after
all, a good deal less exciting, at least in the short run, than a
resource war or peculiar weather.  He could not compete with the
unexpected reversal of a country's fortune.  In addition, he had said,
"You would think that increased processing speed would cause things to
go faster.  But that is not the case!"  In other words, no one thought
of him as a threat.

He explained, "As you speed up, you need more and more I/O, input and
output.  There are some things an artificial intelligence with faster
processors can do better than a natural human.  An AI can add numbers
faster.  But no one yet knows how to turn faster computation without
I/O into deeper love or fear.

"Yes, you can use a faster processor to emulate a slower set of
parallel processors.  You can put faster processors together in
parallel.  But even with all that, and even though each segment or
ability works fine, the combination fails to grow much in speed.  This
was not expected.

"So AIs end up being like regular humans in many areas.  This makes
them easier to understand, but not as god-like as many had hoped."  He
did not say, "... as god-like as many feared."

Very few biological humans noted that the statement came from an
artificial intelligence, not a natural.  In any case, almost all
thought of 'Allen Intro' as a single person.  Few considered the
implications of an artificial intelligence who could think ten times
the speed of a human, not a million times as fast, who could readily
copy himself and, with Peter's nano-assembler, readily duplicate
himself.

Chapter 39
**********

Eltis kept visiting the university and staying with Filgard.  She
continued to sleep in the spare room.  She tried out a speech on him.
He listened; it was not long:

     _"Every politician must please three audiences at the same time:
     supporters, civil servants, and citizens._

     _"It is not easy._

     _"To do this, a politician will try to appear -- and if there is
     a fierce opposition, an independent court system, serious
     reporters, the politician will trully be -- legal, legitimate,
     and full of light._

     _"(This talk is full of alliteration ...)_

     _"By legal, I mean honest, both in the limited sense of legally
     honest and in the more extended sense of unimpeachable."_

Filgard cocked an eye.

     _"In the first sense of honesty, we can readily imagine a crook,
     a crooked politician, changing the ranking that various
     contenders have already received from a government agency.  That
     way his or her supporters gain more of the taxpayers' resources._

     _"In the second sense, the politician ensures that his or her
     contender receives more income from taxes than is considered
     legitimate partisanship.  Impeachment is political; it is not
     about the formal law as such._

     _"By legitimate, I mean that enough people accept the government.
     Legitimacy reduces the cost of government and enables rule
     without too much policing._

     _"By full of light, I mean transparent, truthful, and competent.
     I imagine a torch held up, like an Olympic runner; but you can
     think of an electric light shining on the activities of
     government._

"That is good," said Filgard.  "You have not said what you mean by
'transparent, truthful, and competent.'  I am not sure that matters."

Eltis continued.

     _"It goes without saying that a government must encourage
     independent courts and serious reporters."_

Filgard looked puzzled again.

     _"After all,"_ said Eltis, _"it is necessary for a government to
     ensure order and security first of all, lest people die.  Next,
     it must provide law, so the social world becomes more
     predictable."_

Filgard kept on looking puzzled.  But Eltis continued.  She knew the
answer was coming up.

     _"Only after it has provided for order and law can a government
     provide justice -- fortunately, most civilized countries do.
     Through sad experience we have found historically that judges who
     are bound to a specific executive will favor that executive.
     Only when a court system is independent will judges be
     independent and provide justice.  That is why we have to provide
     for an independent judiciary._

     _"After providing order, law, and justice, a government must
     provide democracy.  Democracy enables people to eject a
     government without provoking civil war."_

Filgard nodded.  Eltis had talked about order, law, justice, and
democracy.  He could see that each required the previous for success.
Law required order.  The phrase 'law and order' had the sequence
reversed.  'Those words sound good,' he thought.  'Still,' he decided,
'the most basic need is order.  Justice requires order and law.
Democracy requires order, law, and justice.'

That all made sense to Filgard.  He wondered about civil rights and
states rights, limitations on government.  Eltis said nothing about
them.  Filgard was a little disappointed.  Instead, she focused on
reporters and an opposition.  That, Filgard agreed, was also
important.

     _"We need an opposition and we need reporters.  Reporters tell
     the rest of us what the government is doing.  We mostly do not
     pay attention; certainly, we should not have to.  Reporters tell
     us what the opposition proposes.  It enables us to decide whether
     to keep the current government or throw it out._

     _"That process requires a government to encourage its opposition.
     After all, the opposition will rule, if not immediately, then
     eventually."_

Filgard nodded again and smiled.

     _"To fulfil its three means, legality, legitimacy, and lightness,
     politicians and people evaluating them have four criteria, the
     'four Ps of politics': protect, preserve, prepare, and provide._

     _"For example, is an elected politician in a government
     protecting citizens, civil servants, and supporters from
     pollution?  Is he preparing them for an unexpected future?_

     _"In more detail, everyone, politicians, reporters, the public,
     uses the 'five Rs': rigor, reason, reality, reliability, and
     responsibility._

     _"Thus, are those in society who are responsible, the
     politicians, investigating the reliability of the education of
     those who will follow?  Are they investigating the education of
     their children?  Are they doing so with rigor, reason, and a
     sense of reality?_

     _"Or are they irresponsibly focusing on unreal notions?_

She paused for a moment and changed her voice.

     _" 'Ah,' you will ask, 'who determines reality?'_

Then she returned to her usual voice.

     _"As a practical matter, reality or irreality is presented by the
     leaders of a society; and most people accept it.  Not everyone,
     of course, but most.  And most of those who do not accept do not
     try to overthrow a government violently._

     _"In a slowly changing world, the world of our ancestors, those
     who presented reality, our ancesters' leaders, may be long dead.
     The living may learn everything when they are young; and their
     world may change so slowly that that learning is sufficient._

     _"But the modern world changes.  What protected our grand-parents
     when they were young does not protect us now._

     _"Finally, whatever action a government undertakes must be
     repeatable.  That is because an action has to succeed in the time
     of our great-great grandchildren as much as now."_

Filgard waited for a moment to make sure she was finished, and then he
said, "How are you going to do what Fairta recommended?"

"By suggesting," Eltis said, "that people like her, the Sanguine,
check the truth or falsehood of the two sequences: protect, preserve,
prepare, and provide, on the one hand, and on the other hand, rigor,
reason, reliability, and responsibility.  At the same time, people who
work hard and have common sense, the Melancholic or Guardians, can
decide how much a politician protects us in reality."

"I can think of more 'Rs:' 'Repeatably reveal reality reliably,
rigorously, reasonably, and responsibly,' " he said.

"That is seven," she said.  "Too many.  I worry that few will bother
to remember the 'five Rs' or even the 'four Ps.'  With luck, they will
be able to reconstruct the 'three Ls,' law, legitimacy, and lightness,
but may not care.  Memory only comes from enhancement, which Tuppak is
developing, or by effort.  Even when you are directly interested, you
need to struggle.  Only a child does not feel the effort when he or
she learns a spoken language or other inbuilt desire."

Filgard thought about her comment.  "That may be true," he said.  "I
am not sure."  He paused longer, then asked, "How are you going to
have Guardians figure the more or less?"  He gave an example, "A
politician may successfully protect people against non-human enemies,
like pollution, but fail against human enemies.  Or the opposite."

"Failure is large negative valuation, like failure to prepare citizens
for various possible futures," said Eltis.  "A focus on the unreal --
that is a very large negative valuation."

Filgard said, "The word 'valuation' suggests a numerical scale.  But
we cannot talk about that."

"In this case," said Eltis, "the negative will be less.  That is all
it can be.  But everyone can think of numbers.  It is just that
according to this notion, a few like them more."

She thought for a while about the original question, how to determine
degrees of evidence.  "As for the other temperaments," said Eltis, "I
am going to say that people who favor voting and civil rights as Fiske
would say, the Choleric as Galen would say, should see whether a
proposal is more idealistic than the alternatives.  Finally, I am
going to suggest that people like you and me investigate."

"That sounds very Phlegmatic.  I am influenced, but will others be?"

"I don't know," said Eltis.  "But I do know that I am not persuaded by
divisions between us and them, unless they are both real and
significant.  When I make a speech I do poorly when I am not
persuaded.  Similarly, I am not convinced by common sense or by
history."

"What about common sense?"  asked Filgard mildly.

"Which common sense?"  Eltis responded sharply.  "Do you mean the
common sense that said that fire is an element like water?  Or do you
mean something else?"  Then she softened.  "I am not against important
and truthful common sense; it's just that most people never check.
The same with history."

"That we can agree with," said Filgard.  "I suppose that swaying
together, or stomping, or shouting slogans, they are all ways of
indicating acceptance."

Eltis nodded.  "Yes, that and ways of persuading others in the crowd.
That is not irrational.  If you are going to accept what others say,
which is what most do, then most often, you should accept what
everyone else near you tells you they believe.  But those actions do
not persuade me.  Others can make that kind of speech, but I cannot."

She asked more.  "Can we succeed without progress in non-human areas?
That is my question.  It looks that we can succeed, at least for a
generation or two.  Obviously, physical technology makes it all
easier.  Your recorder and Peter's nano-assembler will help
enormously.  So will Tuppak Nassik's work."

Filgard still did not know about Tuppak Nassik, but did not inquire.

Eltis continued.  "Just the old social technologies of politics --
protect, preserve, prepare, and provide, as well as responsibility,
rigor, reason, reality, and reliability -- these old technologies make
a new society possible.  We can and will do more, but I wanted to
check them.

"Based on your comments, I figure little is wrong."

"You left out many details," said Filgard.

"I know," said Eltis, "and the devil is in them."  She paused.  " 'The
devil is in the details.'  That is true.  But most people find them
boring; indeed, only some people will pay attention to what I say.

"Moreover, when we have the underlying principles right, the details
follow.  The devil gets them when their principles are unknown or
contrary."  She chuckled.  "That is why so many countries break so
many diplomatic agreements: treaties are written to match contrary
principles, to smooth over differences.  Eventually, the differences
become important again.

"I am trying to create a Movement with a single set of good principles
that will last several generations.  That is my minimum hope.
Ideally, the society will last forever."

"... or the end of the universe, which ever comes first," said Filgard
smiling.  Eltis laughed with him.  "I mean, a very long time."

She looked at Filgard.  "We have this political social technology.  We
have the other kinds of social technology; we have physical
technology.  We are getting there."

Chapter 40
**********

It turned out that even with Allen Intro's help, no one could build a
good sized hydrogen, helium three, or hydrogen-boron fusion reactor.
Available technology could not even begin to handle the confinement
for a hydrogen-boron reactor.  But Allen Intro did devise a very small
helium three fusion device, a millimeter on a side.  Because it did
not give off any neutrons at all, and because it did not require much
helium three, which was rare on Earth, it was built.

As the AI said, "In bombs, we can fuse light elements together and
convert the mass to energy quickly; we have known how to do that for a
long time.  But for steady, more human energy conversion ... Strong
and weak nuclear forces might enable us to build even smaller
reactors, but we do not know how to manipulate those forces.

"The other force, which we also do not know how to manipulate, is
much, much weaker.  It works; we know that.  We depend on it.  But the
smallest star, which pulls nuclei together with gravity, is larger
than Jupiter.  This helium three fusion device is the only steady
fusion energy device we can build, besides those of the same size that
fuse hydrogen and give off neutrons."

The only way to convert a great deal of mass to energy would be to add
numerous tiny helium three fusion reactors together.  Replicators
could create many reactors; in addition, they could duplicate
spacecraft to mine helium three on Uranus or Neptune.  So the cost of
the tiny reactors would be effectively zero.

But unfortunately for regular energy requirements, a combination of
tiny fusion reactors took up more volume than a solar collector!  At
least, this was the situation at Earth's distance from the sun.  Thus,
even though costs would be nil, merely for size reasons, even with
assemblers, energy would be converted to a humanly useful form through
non-fusion means.  The solar influx could be converted to electricity
or to a liquid fuel such as gasoline.

Except, as was promptly understood, an interstellar space ship
required a helium three reactor.  An interstellar vehicle would not
receive much energy from outside.  During most of its trip, it would
be too far from anything.  The space ship would not be irradiated by
any star at the rate of a kilowatt per square meter, like a planet in
the humanly habitable zone.  Only the star it was departing and the
star it was approaching could help; and in neither case would it
receive much energy for long.

Fortunately, as the AI said, "This kind of interstellar space ship
does not require much energy.  It mostly coasts.  A tiny helium three
fusion reactor makes sense.  Its main use of energy is for its
continually running mini-magnetospheric plasma generator."  The AI
spoke parenthetically, "(During cruise a continually renewed plasma
pushes many charged cosmic rays aside and reduces the number that
impact the ship.  Renewing the plasma requires energy.)"  Speaking
directly, he said, "The space ship needs energy for sensors and an
internal computer, too, but the total is less than for the plasma."
The AI was also designing the space ship to carry a sufficient source
for the plasma that took the energy.  In theory, he could get the
plasma from the interstellar medium, but he was not sure how much.  He
did not say that he was designing the space ship to carry four
reactors for redundancy.  Any one reactor could provide enough energy
to it.

So the vast reduction in designed fusion reactor size, which at first
was considered a disaster, turned out to lead to help.  As for Earthly
needs, replicators could manufacture other kinds of reasonably sized
devices to convert non-fossil energy in humanly desired quantities.

Chapter 41
**********

A few days later, James walked his bounds again.  The total distance
was not far, but his pigs followed him and they had much shorter legs.
The advantages of this route was that he had cut a path through the
woods on his side of the property line.  He would not bushwhack.  From
the woods, he would go into a field.  He hoped to meet Filgard again
there.  The man went on, thought James, but he was interesting.

Jame did meet Filgard, and as expected, he was guiding a robot.
Filgard had got bored of planting manually.  James hid a smile.

The robot did not look humanoid at all; that did not surprise James.
It looked somewhat like a moving coffin.  It rode on four fat wheels,
one below each corner.  The axis of each wheel was attached on the
inside to a vertical column that climbed up to the body of the robot.
The big wheels were smaller than the space between the bottom of the
robot and the ground.  Very obviously, the wheels could turn around
each vertical column; but to James, the body of the robot still seemed
far away from the ground, so far away that the robot looked like it
might tip over.

James was surprised to see baskets attached to the robot's body.  They
made sense.  He did not think they should surprise him.  However, they
did look weird.

Filgard looked up.  He seemed to expect James.  "It turns out," he
said, "people have already written a good deal of software for
preparing land, for recognizing weeds and intended plants, for
planting, for caring for intended plants, for weeding the others, for
harvesting, and so on.

"I did not bother to buy a farming robot, but put this one together
out of junk I had around and incorporated the free software out there.
The robot has a good balancing program -- that is another piece of
software whose license gives me the freedom to use it, like the
farming programs.  So the robot won't tip over.  But it looks to me as
if the body is too high.  Humans won't like it.  Part of its function
must be to match human wants as well as robot needs.

"The wheels should be away from the body, not under it.  That way,
they will have room to turn.  Maybe each robot should employ six
wheels, not four.  That will improve visible balance even more.  The
middle wheels do not need to turn left or right.  If the robots needs
to move sideways, they can simply lift up rather than scrape.  Their
axles need to be on vertical bars anyhow, to accommodate rough ground
or on a more horizontal bar that can go up and down.  I am thinking of
copying the suspension of the early, uncrewed Mars rovers.

"And, of course, besides diggers and holders for planting, the robot
needs snipers and scratchers to go after weeds.  But I have not
installed them yet.

"It turns out there are different groups working on computer
controlled farming robots.  Without Peter's assembler to bring down
manufacturing costs, and with the costs of energy, which is an
important running cost, farms using them end up growing food that
costs more than food from farms which employ humans.  Peter's
assembler brings down robots' costs.  Even better, it means that human
farmers need only solve interesting problems, like what to do when a
heavy robot tips over."

He stopped for a second.  He was focusing his entire attention on
robot design, not on James.  "We could strengthen the various arms so
a tipped over robot can try to roll upright.  A robot's balance
mechanism may not work when the robot is upside down.  But the robot's
visual sensors can see and its arms can feel what to do, so the arms
could push until the balance mechanism works again.  Actually, what we
now think of as an expensive balance mechanism should be able to tell
whether it is upside down.  With Peter's assembler, it won't be
expensive any more, so it could go into every robot.

"Hmm ...," he digressed.  "I can imagine how to build a
micro-mechanical device with six cantilevers, each with a weight at
the end.  They could be arranged in a box form.  The cantilever on the
bottom would produce the largest positive strain, presuming downward
is positive.  If it tipped over, the one on the top would produce the
largest strain.

"Tipping is such a straightforward problem, I am sure it was handled
more than a generation ago.  I just don't know anything about the
topic yet."

James was considering a different subject.  "Earlier, you spoke of
people in the Melior Movement judging matters with four criteria."  He
remembered them, "protect, preserve, prepare, and provide."

He asked, "How would you apply them to those trees up behind us, to
valuing them with and without a positive rate of interest?"

Filgard paused for a moment, his eyes tracking the robot, who was
happily cruising in a straight line.  James noted that the robot was
planting three rows at once.  It reached the end of the garden plot.
There, it turned like an ox and started back, just as Filgard had, but
three rows over.

Filgard nodded to himself, then turned to James and said,

"A zero rate of interest protects trees and us since the trees are
worth more when they are grown than when smaller.  A positive rate of
interest protects the forestry company.  Its investment is not
stranded for a century or two while we wait for the trees to grow.
The company cuts younger trees, sells them, recoups its investment,
and starts again.  That is _protect_.

"As for _preserve_, a positive rate of interest does not preserve a
grove at all; it preserves the forestry company.  Only a zero rate of
interest preserves the trees themselves.  So you have to decide
whether the trees themselves, their place in the ecology, is worth
it."

"Trees are," said James.

"Sometimes and sometimes not.  Consider garden weeds."  Filgard
pointed at his garden.  "Are weeds there worth it?"  He grinned.  "I
doubt it.  That is why I have removed them and why the robot is going
to receive nippers.  Weeds being removed, that amounts to a very high
rate of interest, the valuation being against them."

"That is true," said James.  "But the value depends on the weed's
location and their number.  A weed outside your garden does not matter
so much; its value is not so negative.  And when they become the last
instances of a species, they stop being weeds, and become valuable."

He thought for a moment.  "The value of weeds depends on their
location and on their numbers, like the value of houses.  So does the
value of trees.  So why are we against positive rates of interest, at
least for determining the value of these trees?"

Filgard answered, "It is because rates of interest fail to handle
non-linear effects well.  It does not matter whether the rates of
interest are set intentionally by a central bank or emergently by a
market.  Either way, interest rates are set by people who can handle
some non-linear effects, but not all.

"It does not matter if this region is deforested."  Suddenly, Filgard
saw the relevance of James' comments a few days earlier about the
reforestation of the northeastern part of the United States.  In this
case, the reforestation might well be irrelevant.  He was not sure.
In any event, as far as he was concerned, everything was fitting
together.  It just took awhile.

"Millions of trees can be cut down", he said.  He knew that although
James had started the topic, he did not see it all.  "Cutting them
down does not effect the world.  I don't think it would matter
terribly much to the planet if the whole northeastern part of the
United States were deforested again.  Maybe it would have some effect,
because that is a big region.  Still, deforesting an area that is one
hundred times the size of what we can see; that is still trivial.  I
mean, it is not trivial to the people or trees involved, but it is
trivial in terms of the world.

"That's why interest rates go wrong.  The people in central banks or
markets cannot perceive non-linear effects that depend on much larger
territories than they imagine or much longer periods of time.

"As an astronomer, I bet you can see that.  Other than nova,
everything takes millions and millions of years."  He opened his face.
"I suppose you cope by considering the right durations and by avoiding
interest rates!"  James nodded and grinned.

Then James asked, "What about Easter Island?  That got deforested and
is not so big."  "Good point," said Filgard.  "Easter Island may
provide an argument against this hypothesis.  I don't know enough
about Easter Island.  Or maybe the reason is different, an addition,
not a counter.

"Maybe the statues on Easter Island implied a very high rate of
interest.  The people did not have any rate of interest overtly, not
that I know of, but like any group of entities, people, cows, mosses,
a rate of interest exists regardless."

"How do mosses have a rate of interest?"  asked James.

"It is the species that has the rate of interest.  A moss that
consumes its environment dies.  A more successful moss reproduces.  I
don't know whether an individual moss can perceive its environment,
but the species certainly reflects it.  Areas with high interest rates
that go against an individual moss, they soon don't have any moss at
all."

"No one calls that a 'rate of interest.' "  said James.  "No," said
Filgard, "but it amounts to a rate of interest."

Filgard continued on what he considered the significant topic, large
territories; he thought of himself as being on a roll, "Besides, just
as trees grow old, fall down, and all that is harmless, so cutting is
also harmless to the planet, if not to the locals, even cutting a
region larger than you or I can imagine.  Beyond that is danger."

He kept right on going.  "It was not until recently that humans had a
global effect.  Stone age hunters set forest fires.  That may have had
an effect.  Modern tree companies certainly have an effect.  In any
case, humans have had a global effect for fewer than a million years
-- maybe, as a practical matter, for only a hundred thousand years or
ten thousand years or even fewer.  In any case, most people, most of
the time, focus on what will happen in less than a year.  They waste
fewer calories when they do that.  It makes sense.  The future is
uncertain.  On the whole, most people only think far ahead sometimes.
When they think about children and grand-children they have to think
far ahead.  They don't do that all the time."

"So you are saying," said James, "that these are questions of impact
and balance?  Less of an impact, less a problem.  More balance, less a
problem."

James tried to make himself clearer.  "By balance, I mean a social
balance between organizations that value distant people and events the
same as those close by, that is to say, the zero interest rate
organizations, and those who don't, the positive interest rate
organizations."

"Yes, that is what I am saying," said Filgard, "except that I think
your phrasing over-simplifies the difficulties.  Indeed, while it is
truthful to say these are questions of balance and impact, that may
not help.  People have tried for generations to reach a better balance
and to reduce the impact; and they have failed."

"What do you mean, failed?"

"Well," Filgard sighed, "thousands of years ago, idealists banned
usury in two grand religions I know about, Christian and Moslem.  But
positive rates of interest crept back.  In Christianity, usury got
redefined, not as any interest above zero, but as a high rate of
interest.  The balance did not hold.  Originally, the balance was
determined by the numbers of people who professed different religions.
Only one of them in our area, Judaism, permitted usury.  Their members
were the only group who legally could lend money at interest.  But
then Christians began to permit it.

"In their recollections of the Bible, at least in my upbringing,
authoritative Christians emphasized Matthew 25:26.  It says, '... Thou
wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed
not, and gather where I have not ....'  They interpreted a zero
interest rate investment as 'wicked', in contrast to investments that
obtain a positive rate of return.  They were not talking about
increases in equity; they were talking fixed-interest loans.  The
Biblical verse employs the words 'sow' and 'reap', too.  Those terms
suggest growth in less than a year.

"The people who told me this suggested, but never said, that the verse
was very likely written by a fellow like them.  I think that Matthew
was anything but a Platonic Idealist.  Instead, my suspicion is that
he was a person whom Plato would have called a Guardian, a man whose
temperament favored a positive rate of interest.

"Still, I wonder what Matthew actually said, although I am not so
concerned that I am going to research it.  All I know is what I was
told by people I thought of as authorities when I was a child."

He shook his head.  "That is how notions get passed on and how they
get changed from generation to generation.

"The Moslems have kept up the ban longer, but Islamic banks are
introducing more and more ways to get around it.

"As for _prepare_, and _provide_" -- Filgard remembered the main topic
-- "without a proper social balance, we cannot begin to prepare for a
world five hundred years from now."

James said, "Most will say that we cannot imagine what it will be
like.  Certainly, I can't.  They will say that hundreds of years ago
no one could imagine the present."

"Yes, it is true," said Filgard.  "But we are still suffering the
impacts of choices made then.  Consider coal, and more recently mined
liquid and gaseous fuels.  In the European Middle Ages, miners often
thought that ores grew back like plants.  They thought of the activity
as sustainable.  If they had been right, we would have a much easier
time.  We would be rid of one set of harmful impacts.

"I don't know when that belief ended.  But by the beginning of the
20th century, everyone knew that coal, petroleum, and natural gas were
finite."

"The beginning of the 20th century is not five hundred years ago!"
said James.

'No," said Filgard, "but we are still suffering from decisions that
were made then.  Ignorance of the natural law is no more an excuse
than ignorance of a social law.  You get bit either way.

"That coal, petroleum, and natural gas would be used up -- everyone
knew that by the beginning of the 20th century.  They knew that
eventually they would have to get the energy in other ways.  They knew
that fossil fuels needed replacing."

"Maybe the farsighted figured that the work on ocean thermal systems,
on wind turbines, and on atomic processes received enough funding,"
said James.  "Or maybe they lacked the power to fund appropriate
alternative discoveries and development properly."

"Either or both may be true," said Filgard.  "I don't know.  In any
case, we are in a pickle now.  The problems are caused by social or
political relations; they are not based on technological ignorance
like many collapses in the old days.

"As for details -- the Melians have five categories.  In English, the
words defining them are alliterative, the five 'R's: rigor, reason,
reality, reliability, and responsibility."

Filgard smiled and spoke parenthetically.  James was ready.
"(Alliterative lists are easier to learn than other kinds.  So are
rhymes at the ends of words.  After the invention of writing, you
don't need this kind of help much, except that remembered items come
to mind.  Hence the attraction of alliterative or rhymed lists.  But
the words are not necessarily alliterative in other languages.  As it
happens, the five 'R's do not exist in the language the Melians plan
to adopt.  The Melior Movement cannot make this alliterative list
...)"

He left his digression.  "Certainly, over the past few centuries, it
would have been responsible to cut down many of these trees.  More
land to grow food, to graze animals: an increased population needed
that.  In those days, we suffered a lower level of technology.

"But at the same time, a country, a society, would only be responsible
if a few investigated rigorously and with reason how much could be
cut.  Without a decent understanding of ecology, their studies might
not fit our understanding of reality; nonetheless, they could reliably
have figured out how many wild animals would be left after cutting
part of the forest, especially those they and their children would
hunt."

He stopped for a moment.  "Let me say that again: in terms of the five
'Rs' -- rigor, reason, reality, reliability, and responsibility, --
society was responsible for rigorously studying how many trees could
be cut down.  Reason would have overcome such studies' irreality, and
done so reliably.

"We can do as much for our future."

Chapter 42
**********

Data packets, none of people, a computer, nearly sentient but not an
AI, its effectors, batteries, and a small instance of Peter's
nano-assembler were launched into low Earth orbit.  They massed about
four grams, took up very little volume, and rocketed into orbit in
what most thought was a capsule carrying the remains of an astronaut.
Indeed, there were ashes in an openable compartment.  A technician
checked before the rocket blasted off and saw them.

However, the compartment had a bottom much closer to its top than
anyone knew; there was room behind it.  In space, the computer
translated what was in the data packets.  Then, it used its small
helium three reactor to power the assembler in its disassembly mode
and go through the wall of the capsule; a little human corruption had
ensured that the capsule was on the outside of the satellite.  Next,
it manufactured solar collectors.  It was able to deploy the solar
collectors with no trouble.

Then, with enough energy assured, the computer enlarged the assembler.
These tasks used the astronaut's ashes and metals from the capsule.
Then the computer built more solar collectors and a magnetospheric
plasma generator using much of the rest of the rocket, the metals and
ashes from other people.  The computer left a decoy in orbit for radar
to detect, stealthed itself more or less, and left Earth orbit when no
one was looking.

The whole operation was an instance of security that came about
because humans worried only about direct dangers, a kind of 'security
by obscurity.'  Various countries looked at the newly launched
satellite in visible light, infra-red, and with radar.  They convinced
themselves that the vehicle was as claimed, a money-making mechanism
for putting the ashes of dead people into orbit.  Initially, of
course, it looked as claimed.  Even a nuclear inspector, an unmanned
spacecraft paid for by the larger and richer spacefaring nations, had
approached and checked for radiation.  It had maneuvered by radar and
looked at the space craft visually and in infra-red.  Later, only
various radar fences automatically monitored the close Earth
environment.  The radar decoy worked fine.

The little computer was smart.  It tested the magnetospheric plasma
device, found that the late 20th century theoretical design was fairly
good, made a few changes to improve acceleration, and headed towards a
small planetoid.

Travel to the planetoid did not take long, a little less than six days
total.  Even at one-twentieth of an Earthly gravity, the continuous
acceleration made for a maximum speed of nearly 100 kilometers per
second.

The vehicle landed after reaching the planetoid, which had a number
but was too small and common to have gained a name.  The computer and
assembler promptly started to use the planetoid's substance to make a
bigger solar collector, a bigger nano-assembler, and then to
manufacture more.

It built a laser transmitter and receiver.  For fear lest an Earthly
radio telescope be looking at just the wrong moment, the computer
looked in the opposite direction from Earth to make sure there were no
interesting astronomical sights.  Then it briefly transmitted to Earth
in an unlikely frequency.  Because the laser beam did not diverge
much, its 'footprint' was considerable less than the width of a
continent.  There were no known wide-angle antennas that could receive
its transmission and the obscure frequency probably meant no amateurs
picked up the transmission either.  In any case, the transmission was
short and well encrypted.  If an amateur saw the transmission, he or
she would say, "Wow ... this must come from a little green man."

The Melians on Earth, who did monitor the planetoid and who did
receive the transmission, did not hear any Earthly comment at all.
They decided their project was unknown.  They transmitted back saying
they had received the message.  They did not expect the distant
computer to transmit more unless it had a problem or unless asked.
Since it suffered no problems and was not asked, it did not transmit
again.

The effort convinced Eltis and the others that the Melians could flee.
They had to be copied, made into small data packets, conveyed to
space, an interstellar craft had to be designed, built, and loaded,
helium three for its fusion reactor had to be obtained, particle beam
devices had to be built to push it ... the steps were not easy, but
they were definitely doable.

Chapter 43
**********

The next time James saw Filgard, he was looking at James' path through
the woods.

"A recognition of non-linear effects, and their being large," Filgard
started saying abruptly, "mean that you would need permission to cut
that path."

James was accustomed to Filgard, but even he was puzzled.  "What do
you mean, 'non-linear effects'?"  he asked.

Filgard was still obscure.  He said, "Interest rates go wrong because
people cannot handle territories or times more interconnected than
they can imagine."

He tried to be more clear, "When few trees are cut, it does not
matter.  That happens when populations are lower and each person has
little effect.  Then a central government gains enormously by
decentralizing control and encouraging local people to decide locally.
The word is 'subsidiarity.'  It is what led to the notion of private
property."

"What do you mean, that 'led to the notion of private property'?"
asked James.

"Private property is guarded by a bigger government.  Otherwise, the
most powerful gangster gets it all.  You can call him a clan leader,
warlord, or emperor.  If he can decide arbitrarily what to do on your
land, he is the owner, not you, regardless of what you think.  A
government, I am thinking of a government bound by law, forbids
individuals acting arbitrarily.  They can act, but they may not act on
their own."

"In other words, the government acts as a night watchman."

"Yes," said Filgard, "that is exactly it.  The problem is, nowadays, a
legitimate government cannot just forbid clan leaders, warlords, and
emperors."

"What do you mean?"  asked James.

"The world is too small," said Filgard, "for lots of trees to be cut.
That is the kind of situation we are in now.

"The Disaster raised fuel prices and caused lots of other social
learning, but your cutting a few trees, that is not an issue."

"My cutting a few trees does not matter," said James.

"Your cutting a few trees, a million people cutting a few trees --
that does not matter.  Your intuition, your imagination is right.  But
when vaster numbers with larger effects cut trees, then your action
adds in, even though it is very small."

"So what is your conclusion?"

"People in government have to decide whether to permit you to make
your trail, or not.  You cannot decide on your own, because you
experience too little.  The rules applied by the watchman must change.
He cannot only protect you against other humans and non-human forces,
like hurricanes.  He must also figure out the consequences of fed back
impacts."

"That is not yet a conclusion," said James.

"The fed back impacts lead to a conclusion.  Remember, the world is
too big for people to imagine consequences on a planetary scale.  That
is the problem."  Filgard stopped for a second.

"One solution is that people in government discover whether you have
acted without gaining their permission.  It is very likely that this
sort of investigation is best done by computer and aerial
surveillance.  Satellite observations are the only way to go.  On a
world-wide basis it is too expensive to do anything else.

"Also, your life must be made more complicated.  You need to know
ahead of time that you may not act on your own.  You must contact a
government agent.  And, of course, you need an easy appeal mechanism.
Otherwise, those people win who are trying to control you arbitrarily.
Everything is unpleasant."

"It is the end of private property as we know it," said James.

"That is right," said Filgard.  "And worse, if people you don't know
did not exist, if the Earth's population were lower, you would not
have to do any of this.  Your and everyone else's impact would be so
small that you could survive happily.  You could act as if the world
were flat and not a ball."

Filgard went on.  "You -- I mean you singularly now, not 'you' in the
generic sense -- you can imagine what society could do to avoid this
extra complexity.  If you come from a successful warring society, and
the others are not part of your ingroup, you can imagine killing them.
If you come from a peaceful society, you can imagine reducing impact
and populations over six or seven generations."

"Or," said James, "I can imagine living in a spaceship with a limited
ecology and not minding when impositions are put on me."

"The problem," said Filgard, "is that spaceship Earth is so big and
people so disparate that few see the ecology as limiting to them
personally.  That is what I mean when I say that 'interest rates go
wrong because people cannot handle territories or times more
interconnected than they can imagine.'  The world is too big."

Filgard thought for a moment and James waited.  He had persuaded
Filgard to think and to talk about interest rates.  The robot was
weeding.  It used the trowels and such that it had before as well as
nippers.  In James' estimation, the robot still stood too tall.  It
stood above its wheels rather than between them.  Clearly, Filgard had
added the nippers, but he had not rebuilt the wheel system.  He was
now watching the robot to make sure it weeded correctly.  He did not
want it to pull up the sprouts grown from the seeds it planted
earlier.

Then James decided to speak.  He said, "In six or seven generations,
people could learn that Earth is a spaceship, albeit a big one."

Filgard responded, "How are you going to get from here to there?"  He
waved his hands.  "I mean that literally; well, not quite.  I mean,
what policies are you recommending now?  These policies will have to
be implemented by people in governments that neither you nor I like
and which do not like us or people like us.

"This planet is a big place with lots of countries and cultures on it.
On the one hand, that is good.  Earlier, you talked about needing
multiple non-profit organizations.  Having different countries and
cultures is like that.

"If the globe contained just one country," said Filgard, "and that
country's policies were wrong, the spaceship would diminish.  That is
the problem.  The world has lots of countries and people; and many are
bad.  No one can get them all together.  As far as I can see, a
government must be unitary.  And for ecological management, it has to
be right.  Put another way, a spaceship requires right, unified
action.  Otherwise, it may go wrong.  Or it may not.

"Suppose you could cut your trail, but no one else could do anything
like that?  Others would think it unfair.  They would figure that you
are gaining from their inaction, from their virtue."

James froze for a moment, then asked, "It is like crime, isn't it?"
He was not clear what 'it' referred to.  He went on, "Although it
matters to the victim, it does not matter to a society when there is a
small amount of crime.  But it matters when there is a lot.  The same
is true on a spaceship.  You can do little things without harming it,
but not big things.  Can't we just let some others go?"

"Well, two centuries ago we could," said Filgard, "maybe even a
century ago.  But now I am not sure.  Enforcement will miss actions
regardless.  Little things will add up.  Crime will grow big.  That is
dangerous.  Worse, the 'others,' as you call them, cannot be left out.
They are too many and too powerful.  We cannot go alone."

"So you are saying," said James, "two things, that we would have to
enforce domestic restrictions well, and that we need to involve
others."

"That's right," said Filgard.  "But I do not expect success in
changing the nature of private property as we know it; the mechanisms
will be corrupted.  People will not like the extra complexity that
extra impacts have on a spaceship.  For them, it translates into extra
taxes that the corrupt avoid.  And no one likes giving a free ride to
crooks.

"Markets won't work either.  They don't have to be unitary, like
governments.  Different people in them can and do act differently.
But markets won't give the right signals.  The net result will be that
people act wrongly.  That is because the world is finite, but larger
than anyone can imagine.

"I expect a planetary collapse, not immediately, but within a century.
I expect to be dead by the time it happens.  Put another way, if you
have a positive rate of interest, a distant collapse does not matter."

Filgard stopped for a moment.  James waited.  "As for foreigners: I
doubt our enemies will pay attention to us when we cannot even police
our own society.  In any event, I doubt they have learned enough from
the Disaster to cooperate.  Or perhaps they learned different lessons.

"Moreover, I doubt the powerful among us have the same long-term
intent as you and I do.  They won't see that ecological collapse leads
to an end for research funding and to a population drop.  Or they
might see and not care.  From their point of view, an ecological
collapse will lead to an increase in the value of what they own, the
value of what they control.  That is what I see.  It is very
depressing."

Chapter 44
**********

When she saw Filgard again, Eltis was cheerful.  "We can migrate to
another planet," she said.  "We have all the pieces for all the
technologies.

"We have had the social pieces for a long time: a common language,
based on an artificial one invented generations ago, a better
numerical system, aids for judgment, also invented generations ago;
now we have all the material technologies.

"We have spray-droplet machines and nano-assemblers that can
manufacture us affordable rockets that can get us off the planet.  The
same assemblers can manufacture the power collectors and the particle
beam devices to push an interstellar vehicle.  The atoms can come from
planetoids.

"Back in the latter 20th century someone invented and now we have in
space a working mini-magnetospheric generator which can produce the
plasma that gets pushed.

"Allen Intro invented a working, miniature fusion reactor.  That is
needed to keep the plasma generator going for a century or two --
during interstellar cruise, its magnetic field will keep most cosmic
rays away from the space ship.

"Tuppak Nassik developed a procedure for killing people and storing
their data.  He used your recorder!  He also developed a procedure for
impressing that data onto a force-grown body, thereby rebirthing the
person.  That was critical.  You have to be able to do both for any of
this to work.  He also, or his team, developed an ability to
manipulate stored data.  That means we can teach everyone, including
especially adults, a common language, a better numerical system, aids
to judgement, and more."

For the first time, Filgard heard that he would not have to study a
language.  The felt need for it had put him off the Melior Movement.
On the one hand, he agreed with the idea.  On the other hand, he did
not think it was for him.  He had considered himself too old to learn
a vocabulary.  Waking up with a new language -- that made the Melior
Movement much more interesting.  He regretted that Fairta had not
lived this long.

Eltis continued, "When everyone is reborn, they will already know how
to be part of a common and sophisticated society."

She stopped for a second.  "Weirdly enough," she said, "I don't know
who first made a force-grown human body possible.  I presume it was
Tuppak's group, but I do not know for sure.  In any case, the
procedure exists.  If you have enough sophisticated computers and
such, which your recorder and Peter's nano-assembler make possible,
force-grown bodies are cheap."

Eltis went on.  "Although we do not need AIs -- you do know that Allen
Intro can readily duplicate himself, right?  -- " Filgard nodded.
"AIs will make it easier to pick the rest of what is needed for
terraforming and for history.  I suspect that terraforming itself will
done by smart, but non-conscious computers.  It will take a long time
and, mostly, be very dull.  'Watching the grass grow.' That is going
to have to be done for years and years.  We can be dead through all
that.  It will be a wonderful time to skip!

"There are many pieces, the different social and political
technologies; the physical technologies.  They are all coming
together.  Your recorder is important!  So is Peter Dev's
nano-assembler.  Tuppak Nassik's rebirth is also.  The other
technologies are old, excepting for the miniature fusion reactor.  The
social and political technologies are old and well established.

"We can do it.

"You know," she looked closely at Filgard again, "sometimes it makes
sense to fight and other times to flee.  Well, this is flight, not
fight.

"If necessary," she said, "we could confront the powers that be on
Earth.  We have the capability.  Most likely some Movement people
would survive such a confrontation.  They would be able to leave.
However, I do not think I would be one of them, or you.  I don't know
of anyone you or I know who would survive.  We have fought to save the
planet and we are losing.  Fleeing is the only option, at least if we
want to go on living.

"We will leave behind what everyone needs to survive and to survive
well, but we will be out of it.  Maybe our departure will trigger
goodness.  I hope so.  In any case, we will have a new opportunity!"

Filgard decided Eltis was happy.  He looked at all the steps before
leaving and was not.  He looked ahead; he saw hard work and possible
defeat.

As far as he was concerned, an existence proof did not necessarily
lead to practice.  All the pieces meant only that there was another
existence proof.  He personally liked this one.  He would like to
colonize another planet.  He would enjoy being reborn, too; he did not
want to die.

Filgard was changing his opinion.  Maybe he could have a next life and
remember this one.  The notion attracted him; it was not a belief
without evidence.

But for interstellar migration other existence proofs had come long
before.  Filgard remembered reading about generation ships when he was
young.  Not only did they populate science fiction novels, they filled
engineering journals.  Generation ships took time, not speed.  They
carried whole humans, alive.  Mid-20th century energy sources could
move big habitats.  You could carry people off the planet in huge
craft powered by exploding nuclear bombs.  That would put radioactive
substances into the air.  (Filgard wondered whether coal fired
electric power plants were worse.  They sent uranium dust into the air
when they burned coal.  At least, some did.  He had never seen a
trustworthy discussion.)

In any case, with mid-20th century explosions, humans could accelerate
in space.  Interstellar migration had been doable and not too
expensive, at least for rich governments.

The problems had been social, not technical.  How do you keep
relatively small societies going for centuries and millennia with the
proper amounts of passed-on knowledge?  Why would people who have
spent their whole lives in space in a habitat want to spread onto a
planetary surface?

The Melior Movement's plan was different.  They depended on a more
advanced technology.

People would go from one planetary surface to another, without too
much felt time in between, maybe none.  Travel and terraforming would
take centuries, but people would not experience them.  They would not
live that time.  And they would be reborn.  From a human point of
view, it would be easier.  From a technical point of view ... ?
Filgard wondered.

Chapter 45
**********

Vallen was proud of his achievements.  Part had to do with the
spray-droplet machines he increasingly used for manufacturing.  He,
which is to say, the engineers he hired, could make alloys by mixing
two or three substances.  Droplets were small enough that they mixed
thoroughly before freezing solid.  Solid particles could be mixed.  It
was a neat advantage.

But he suddenly had a hard time obtaining vanadium dust to alloy with
steel dust.  Few companies supplied it.  A group of them were pushing
up prices.  Vallen knew he could get as much vanadium steel as he
wanted; the alloy had been around since before the first Model T car.
He decided that he did not have to make his own alloy.  He could
granulate blocks of metal instead.

That practice added complexity.  He needed more machines.  But over
all, manufacturing grew cheaper.  He started buying other blocks of
metal, too, and granulating them.  That cut his costs even more.

Besides obtaining the right sized dust as inputs for the technology he
used, Vallen had to transport and sell his products.  At first, he
stuck to just-in-time delivery.  But then he realized that with larger
warehouses and more inventory, both of which cost more than smaller
warehouses and less inventory, he could save more on transport more
than he could save by just-in-time delivery.  Again, he cut costs.

Within his time horizon -- that was a critical realization; beyond it,
he would not be around -- Vallen did not expect to pay the extra costs
of no-longer-in-time delivery.  Eventually, it would cost more.  The
bigger warehouses had fewer people in them and more machines.  That
was another savings.  He could introduce that savings because he made
a big change.  It would take years for fewer and sleepier workers to
cause much damage.  The savings meant the interest on the money he
invested was taken care of.  So he did not bring the eventual costs of
fewer and sleepier workers to anyone's attention.  His successor would
pay.

As he became more successful, his everyday human relations became
easier.  Vallen had an easier time with his chief accountant.  Partly,
he was right more often; partly, the accountant deferred to him more.
Vallen did find he had to think more strategically of where he put
subordinates; capabilities and loyalties had to balance.  He
remembered a story of Howard Hughes in the 1930s.  Hughes wrote names
on cards, moved them around, and constructed new corporations.  Vallen
did the same, except that he copied the names in a computer.  There
were too many to manipulate in his head.

All in all, Vallen felt that his job was challenging.  That was a word
he liked, difficult but not too difficult.  As for the routine
problems that he would find so dull he would grow tired quickly,
subordinates handled them.  Those problems made up the 'expected' and
'known' part of the job.

Vallen knew that just as he had transformed one business by producing
and selling 'Meldon's Microwave,' someone else might transform his.
He could not depend on comfortable, continuous improvement; he had to
be alert for discontinuities.  Vallen thrived.

Chapter 46
**********

Filgard did not understand.  From a practical, short term point of
view, he was foolish.  Nonetheless, he was a revolutionary.

It was not that Filgard had discovered anything new; he had not.  It
was that he described accurately.  Copying James, Filgard spoke of two
kinds of organization, one with positive interest rates, which was
common and expected, and one with zero interest rates.  Talk about the
latter upset many.

Organizations that looked out into the distance existed.  They always
had.  But they did not speak of interest rates.  They never said that
they were zero interest rate organizations, even though they were.
Generally speaking, the people in them never thought of themselves as
having anything to do with interest rates.

Many religious organizations did not expect to vanish.  They hoped to
last forever, even though individuals died.  Some ecological
organizations felt similarly.

In theory, governments planned parts of their actions to last forever,
too.  They expected their judicial and voting systems to last.  They
expected their defense organizations to last, both those designed to
protect their citizens from other humans, such as asymmetrical
attacks, and those designed to protect them from non-human enemies,
such as pollutants and diseases.

Quite rightly, Filgard saw different people as preferring different
actions.  Some people, most of the population he thought, most of the
time, preferred activities with positive interest rates.  They would
understand activities with zero interest rates.  Indeed, they would
think about them occasionally.  They would think about their
great-grandchildren.  But most of the time, they would discount
anything distant, whether in time or space.

Filgard spoke to everyone, not just to Eltis.  She did not mind.  At
first, she did not consider the notion.  She paid attention but did
not concern herself.  She never thought of interest rates and she did
not expect others to, either.

Eventually, however, she reversed herself.  She decided that it would
be a useful concept, except that she did not want to use the phrase
'interest rate.'  She associated the term with economists and with the
kind of businessmen she did not like.

First, she thought to speak of 'sustainable needs.'  Then she realized
that was not a good phrase.  After all, the need for food was an
obvious need for sustenance and food could be grown sustainably.
Next, she thought of 'indefinite', except that word was vague.  Nobody
had good examples of it in mind.  'Sustain' had started the same way,
but over the years, people had created examples for their minds.

She came up with 'everlasting' and synonyms, like 'eternal' and
'forever.'  But she did not like the terms, since they pushed too much
time into the notion.  She wanted to value humans and what they did
for centuries and millennia; she expected the species to vanish in a
geological eon.

All and all, she felt awkward.  She did not like it.

Still, it was a good idea.  It made sense to speak of different
organizations for different purposes.  She did see that one could not
be subordinate to the other, not formally and not informally.  They
had to be co-equal.  Somehow, the boundaries between the two had to be
defined.  Eltis did not mean only the boundaries between
organizations; she meant also between the topics they handled.

In rivers, dams could last lifetimes.  Behind them, their lakes would
silt up.  Larger objects would sink to the bottom, Even with slow
silting, dams would not be beneficial for more than a few millennia.
And much siltine was not beneficial at all.  But of that that was, on
the one hand, it was not like soil, which had to last forever; on the
other hand, it was not like this year's crop.

Eltis felt confusion.  'Here is a third category,' she thought,
'between high interest rate organizations and zero interest rate
organizations.'

In her head, she did a swift calculation, presuming the rule of
seventy: that the approximate doubling time would be seventy divided
by the percent rate of growth.  In one doubling time the present value
would be half.  She remembered that the equation did not really work.
She wished for a computer, but did not have one nearby.  Still, a one
percent rate of growth meant seventy years for doubling,
approximately.  So the result had to be less than a percent.
Seven-tenths of one percent seemed right.  And she could do that
division in her head readily.  Seventy divided by seven-tenths was one
hundred.

'Perhaps,' she thought, 'anything that could last more than forty or
fifty years, but fewer than forty or fifty centuries, should fit into
this third category.'  Then it occurred to her that maybe people
expected anything that lasted more than a couple of generations to
last indefinitely.

But over a millennium, a seven-tenths of one percent interest rate
meant the present value would halve ten times.  Whatever it would be,
whatever of value, a life it could be, would be worth one-tenth of one
percent it is now.  If soil decayed that much, people would die.

She did not know how to handle the question.  'Fortunately,' she
thought, 'I do not have to do everything.  I do not have to answer
every question.  I only think that.  (And to the extent I like
managing, I want that.)  The legislature can figure this out ... I can
start with two categories.'

Eltis remembered the phrase, 'Nothing ever lasts long.'  A positive
rate of interest might not, could not last.  Anything might happen
within the next year; certainly, something would happen within the
next twenty or forty years.  But soil had to nurture as much food in
five millennia as now.  For some things, a zero rate of interest did
have to last.  She did not know how to handle this matter, either.
She would have to pass it to the legislature.

Meanwhile, the Melior Movement could take on the notion of different
organizations for zero and positive interest rates.  That would make
the idea more respectable, except among those who already considered
the Movement dangerous.

Chapter 47
**********

When Filgard asked Eltis Akthorn what he might do, he was surprised
that she suggested he raise pigs.

"Raise pigs!?"  he repeated.  "Yes," she said, "raise pigs.  One of
your neighbors does, so it is not forbidden by a local law.  I know
that some places have local laws against this.  Leaving aside the
smell, which need not impinge on neighbors, many people think of
personal pigs as representing the past rather than the future.  They
do not like it, so they ban it.  But they don't ban personal pigs in
this town.  My hunch is that there are many people here, I think of
them as 'modern people,' who look on pigs or chickens as pets, not as
farm animals.  You can view them as pets, too; however, I also want
you to learn to pretend to be a farmer.  Eventually, we may need you
for smuggling."

"Well, my neighbor might be grandfathered.  I'll have to check."

"That is easy enough," Eltis said.  "You can ask him.  Everyone knows
that you became interested in gardening after Fairta died.  This is
just an extension of that."

"Yes," said Filgard, "I can ask James.  I would have to build housing
for the pigs, a barn.  That could be quite interesting.  I have as
much land as James.  That means I can feed as many as he.  I have
water.  I will have to figure out a way to keep them from smelling.  I
suppose the obvious ways have already been discovered.  I could use
their waste for a methane generator, too ..."

Eltis smiled.  "You can do all those things.  And luckily, you do not
come from a culture, Jewish or Moslem, which saw fertile land become
desert."

She again shifted topics, but Filgard appreciated it.  "As far as I
can see," she said, "they banned pigs thousands of years ago to
prevent them from competing with humans.  Pigs and humans eat the same
food, more or less.  There is not that much fertile land in a desert.
No one at the time liked the ban, but all saw its necessity.  The goal
was to stop raising them; the consequence was that eating pigs became
a taboo."

She left Filgard muttering to himself.

Over time, Filgard became rather good at raising pigs.  He did not
raise many; mostly he ate them himself with a few friends.  But he
sold a few, too.  He found that they imposed necessary tasks on him
that were different from gardening, and as far as he was concerned, as
enjoyable.

Sometime later, Filgard saw Eltis again and she said, "We need to move
the AI. We cannot transmit its data packets over any net, since they
would be discovered.  The AI has backed itself up physically into a
very small volume but for atavistic reasons, wants to remain conscious
while we move him.  That means moving something much bigger.  Rather
than be small, the AI will be the size of the last digit of your
little finger.  At least he is willing to leave his humanoid body."

"What do you mean, 'atavistic'?"  asked Filgard.

Eltis replied, "A computer, even a sophisticated AI, can easily be
copied to a new substrate.  In this case, we would have a dumb machine
copy the data for the AI onto a new machine.  The data takes up the
volume of a bacterium, which means it is easy to hide.  Allen Intro
may worry lest we lose him, or worry that we will not build a new
machine for him soon, or what ever.  Well," she grinned momentarily,
"as a practical matter, him getting lost is an issue.  Bacteria are
small.  Perhaps 'atavistic' is too strong a word."

It never occurred to her or to Filgard that the AI might be concerned
with the legal question: a court might decide that if he slowed to a
stop, that was the equivalent of death.  After all, in most
jurisdictions 'flat lines' were the diagnostic of death.  He would
have to persuade the judge of the difference between "slowing to a
stop" with a backup and "dying forever".  Or he could skip the whole
issue.

"In any case," Eltis said, "Allen Intro wants to be smuggled while
living."  She went on.  "We should abide by his wishes as much as we
can.  After all, his invention of a micro-fusion reactor has made our
kind of interstellar travel possible.  He plans to or already has
selected a long list of things for your recorder to record for the
trip.  Doubtless he, or one of his duplicates, along with lots of dumb
computers, will figure out what is needed for terraforming, too.  We
could do without him, but he makes our lives much easier."

She became more firm.  "As a practical matter, the living AI can be
reduced to block around a cubic centimeter in size.  That includes his
mind, input devices, such as eyes and ears, and output devices, such
as miniature manipulators, speakers, and radio transmitters."  (She
did not consider the legal implications of reducing size and moving to
a new body; Allen Intro did not either.  His presumption was that the
mind counted, not its prosthetics.  That is how he thought of a body.
Humans did not lose their legal rights because they lost their
glasses.)

Eltis said, "Mostly, he will slow down his conscious awareness, so his
time in your pocket or whatever goes by quickly.  That is the great
advantage of being a computer; you can skip the dull parts.  A dumb
computer, that is to say, a smart but non-conscious computer, will
stay alert and speed him up if necessary.  It is all doable."

Filgard stood still for a moment and Eltis did not say anything.  He
took a moment to think.  "I will have to sacrifice my two best pigs,"
he said.  "They will make good cover for a smuggling operation.  I
will pretend to be a farmer selling them privately.  Actually, I don't
have to pretend."  He sounded and looked relieved.  "For the first
part of the trip, I can be myself selling the pigs privately.  But I
won't be able to bring them back.  I was planning to slaughter and eat
them."  He sighed.  "Well, there are the other pigs.  I always was
planning to sell several, but not my best."

It looked to Eltis that Filgard was going for the operation.  She
smiled.  "I am sure we can pay you for the pigs; you might even get a
free meal out of this.  But you are right, the chops will not be the
same."  She sighed, but did not say, 'The sacrifices some people make
...'

Filgard looked at her and smiled a little.  She realized that he knew
what she was thinking and had been teasing her, but in a very discreet
way.  'Never underestimate him,' she decided.  He was less oriented to
the human world than she, but not totally oblivious, just mostly.

"Where do you want Allen Intro to go?"  he asked.  "Ultimately," she
said, "into deep space.  But where I want you to take him ..." she
stopped for a moment and thought about it, "... to the space port, if
you can.  You can go as yourself to a large city to sell your pigs
..." "Yes," he interrupted, "I can do that with no trouble."  "But,"
she went on, "we also have to move him to the space port."

She explained, "By the time you are ready to go, we will have decent,
chemically-fueled, single-stage-to-orbit, air-augmented rockets.  It
is easy with smart computers and duplicators to build them.

"Their existence will upset the space companies, because the
incremental cost, and the price we can sell them at, will be so low.
Actually, the incremental cost will be zero, since replicators can
manufacture them at no cost to ourselves, except time.  The militaries
of major governments will not like them either, since they will be
afraid of getting attacked.  But I am sure we can operate a few, even
if we do not sell any.

"If we take a million people or so off the planet, we will need many
more rockets; at least, I think we will.  We will have to carry them
into space, unless, of course, we can record on planet.  Then we need
hardly anything.  We have already put a nano-assembler into orbit.
All we need to do is put the data into orbit.  We could do that with a
throw away, late 1950s rocket; anyone could do it."

She stopped and considered more.  She had not thought through the
operation before.  "Once we are in the city, it may not be so hard to
move Allen Intro.  We can carry him to the space port in someone's
pocket in a private jet.  Passengers are searched, but not as
vigorously as anyone on a commercial flight; and we do have to send
people to the space port anyhow."

Eltis looked at Filgard.  "Would you like to go?  The overt reason
would be to see whether the land nearby is suitable for Tuppak to set
up many of your recorders with his pressure containers -- I can see
the powers that be limiting how many rockets we use.  At the same
time, they are likely to want rebirth recorders on Earth but near the
space port.  I think they will let us all go, but not want rebirth and
duplicator capabilities or AIs on Earth afterwards.  If the recorders
and the rest are all in one place, they figure it will be easier to
destroy them.

"The advantage of your going, besides the overt reason, which is good,
now that I think about it, is that we do not have to let yet another
person know about the smuggling.  The smaller the number of people,
the more likely we can keep the secret."

"How do we pay for the private jet?"  asked Filgard.  "Oh," said
Eltis.  "You have not realized yet, but we have Peter's assemblers,
along with your recorders.  Together, each pair can duplicate
anything.  We can and have duplicated jewels and sold them.  We now
have the money.

"We can purchase an expensive private jet and fly it.  We have not
publicized this.  For one, so long as we do not tell others, we can
make considerable money and buy influence.  For another, not many have
realized what can be done, but certain powerful people have."

She radiated anger.  "Unfortunately for us, they are ready to use
force to save the economy as it was.  They benefit, even though the
rest of us lose.  That is stupid.  Still, it is another way of saying
they are ready to ban us.  We might win a confrontation; but we might
not.  Whatever happens, many would lose.  They are very clever at
arresting lots of people all at once.  We are not.  It is better that
they help us flee."

She relaxed.  "So long as we don't duplicate more than an amount
leading to money equal to a percent or so of the global economy, they
don't care -- and our present duplication is more like a
ten-thousandths of one percent.  From their point of view, that amount
is much too small to notice, although it is a huge sum for us."

"Why can't I fly out of the local airport?  It handles jets."

Eltis thought about it for a moment.  She did not want to drop her
initial plan, but did not know why.  Then she thought of a reason.
"There will not be as much of a connection between you and Allen
Intro's disappearance.  It is misdirection."

"Yes, but presumably," said Filgard, "the AI will reappear at the
launch site or in space.  If I go to the launch site, someone will
make the connection."

"That is true," said Eltis, "but we will make sure that Allen Intro
does not reappear until you are back home.  The connection will be
seen as a coincidence.  Or maybe we will ask him to change his name.
Or we will not announce his existence.  Maybe we will fake his death
here.  I am going to have to think about this."

She went off on a different topic.  She had considered it.
"Off-planet duplication is a separate issue from on-planet
duplication.  It is more of a military matter.  They, the militaries,
worry about particle beams.  We got to have them to push the space
ship; but they can be used as weapons, too."  She bit her lower lip.
"Right now there are no solutions, but I am sure we all will figure
one out."

She smiled briefly.  The Movement already had a nano-assembler in
space.  Given time and solid objects, it could reproduce itself and
build enough particle beam devices and solar collectors or fusion
reactors to provide them with power.  Besides pushing the interstellar
vessel, the beam machines could threaten the militaries on Earth and
near space.  But it would be more politic, safer, and much easier, to
depart with their help.

"On the other hand," she said, "I doubt the powers that be will accept
space-to-earth energy flows.  No electricity.  Too many of their
supporters, too many businesses, would have to change.  That means the
Earth does not receive the benefits of your and Peter's technology.
Its future looks grim.  We are better off leaving the solar system."

So one day Filgard picked up the AI, which was small, and put it in
his jacket pocket.  He tossed in a regular die, too.  Allen Intro
could pretend to be the other of a pair of dice.  Filgard even had a
reason for carrying them: "sometimes, I have to generate many random
numbers and don't have a computer."  He was old enough that the
possibility made sense.  Or an investigator might think that he
secretly gambled.

Along with other stuff, like his flashlight and measuring tape, the AI
would not get picked up on an X-ray with a pattern matching program.
Someone patting him down would decide the shape could not signify a
gun, knife, or explosive.

Allen Intro's humanoid body had crashed out a window and fallen many
stories.  It had smashed to bits.  The story was that Intro had been
studying a visible aerogel spacer in the window.  He had peered at it
closely -- during the investigation after his death, various people
explained that he could focus very much more closely than humans, and
that by getting closer, he could magnify even more.  So, it was
understood, he leaned against the window, which broke.  It was weaker
than he expected.  He overbalanced and fell.  The police decided his
death was a misadventure.  Martha and Vogel Todd acted very upset and
stopped seeing anyone.  They were known misanthropes, so their
self-imposed isolation fit.

Checkpoints littered the road between Filgard's small city (or big
town, as bigger city people thought) and the city to which he was
bringing the pigs and smuggling the AI. Filgard remembered the time
before checkpoints.  Travel was easier.  The economy did better.  He
had never thought that checkpoints did much good anyhow.  With people,
'security through obscurity' worked.  That is what he planned to do.
He was carrying pigs.  That would distract them.  They might pat him
down, but were unlikely to find the AI. Electronic devices tracked
stress in his voice; and X-ray machines and other devices looked for
guns and explosives, but he was not carrying any.

When he stopped, he almost gave himself away by pretending to be a
dumb farmer.  Actually, he know that modern farmers were seldom dumb;
but they were more innocent.  He was getting ready to change his face
to look more innocent when he remembered that he was traveling as
himself.  The net effect was that his voice did not carry any unusual
stress, just the irritation that was expected and ignored.

The police did look at his pigs and smelled them.  Filgard did not
think they were very smelly, but the police did.  That was obvious.
They determined quickly that Filgard was rich enough that he did not
have to sell the pigs, but they figured he was paying for his hobby
and producing an excuse to visit the city anyhow; or maybe doing
someone in the city a favor by delivering pigs and not charging, but
not telling the police that; or maybe he had figured out some way to
reduce his taxes.  The latter made considerable sense, but they were
not going to investigate.

Filgard went through three checkpoints -- he was surprised at the
number; he had not known there were that many, all a waste -- and
reached the city.  Once he figured they were safe, he took the AI out
of his pocket.

"You know," said Allen Intro through his spots, "we could be much more
dangerous than anyone the police might stop.  I have the designs for
your recorder and for Peter's nano-assembler.  I could build them.  I
have a huge amount of technical knowledge with me.  I could create a
bio-weapon.  I would have to build machines to build machines to
extract the information.  I could do that.  I could make lots of dumb
robots; I could duplicate myself many times.  I won't do that.  But
those checkpoints are stupid.  They are designed for the technologies
of the past.  I suppose they worked well enough for then.  But now ...
?  Thank you for carrying me.  I guess you have to go through one more
search and then we will fly."

Chapter 48
**********

Eltis was wrong to think that anyone would permit more than one or two
rebirth machines on Earth.  She could not establish the data
collection part, consisting of Filgard's recorders inside of Tuppak's
pressure containers.

The problem was that no Earth government would make the operation
legal.  And Eltis wanted to copy a million people.  She had to record
them all first.  She could not copy that many illegally.

Governments continued to consider the part of the process in which
people's brain waves halted as death.  That several hundred rebirths
had taken place on Earth -- that was ignored.  The Movement would have
to record people somewhere other than Earth.

People in the Melior Movement would have to be told about rebirth one
by one.  They would have to be told in circumstances in which they
were likely to believe the story.  Most of them did not know about it;
or if they had heard, thought it a myth.  They expected to go into
suspended animation, that their whole bodies would travel, and that
the interstellar ship would be big enough to carry them all.  The
older and ill hoped that by the time they arrived, new technologies
would give them a few more years.

But the interstellar space ship was small.  It did not need to be
large because the data packets for humans, the computers, and for the
knowledge collected were small.  Rebirth meant all the sentients would
be recorded, yet all would die.  They would be reborn thirty light
years away.

"Off Earth ...", Eltis said to Tuppak.  "If the establishment
concerned is far enough away not to be inspected, no Earth
government's writ will be enforced."  (Both knew that the major
spacefaring nations had established a joint mechanism to inspect space
craft close to Earth.  Uncrewed inspection ships determined whether
the space craft carried nuclear weapons.  It was all for show, since
cheaper biological weapons could easily be hidden and were not sought.
Or maybe the decision makers in the major nations assumed other
soldiers and politicians were dumb.)

Earth governments put limits to the number of vehicles the Movement
could possess peacefully close to the planet.  But with only two
Earth-to-orbit air augmented rockets, and with a hundred
interplanetary space ships pushed by the solar wind, the Movement
could move a million people to distant recorders in less than a year.

Eltis decided that the Melians' new base would be the planet's forward
Lagrangian point, one Astronomical Unit away from Earth.  The location
was somewhat arbitrary.  It was far enough away from Earth that
Earthly governments did not care what went on and close enough that
interplanetary vehicles could carry people there in a reasonable time.

Earth-to-orbit vehicles: the people in the Earth governments thought
of them as the dangerous craft.  Two were acceptable.  That number was
not threatening.  As for a hundred interplanetary space ships -- they
could not be seen, accept occasionally, and would mostly be en-route
to or from the Earth's leading Lagrangian point.  That number was
acceptable, too, so long as they did not collect near Earth all at
once.

The first interplanetary space ship that could carry humans, 'Grace',
was created at the forward Lagrangian point.  It was built by a spray
droplet device and by Peter's nano-assembler.  The space ship traveled
under computer control to Earth.  There a former astronaut, Pan
Grizzel, boarded it.  On her way back to the Lagrangian point, she
thought of many changes to the original design.  As for Grizzel
herself, she was not old, but had absorbed considerable radiation.
Everyone expected that to kill her.

Originally, the woman was named Pandora Grizzel, meaning, her parents
thought 'gift of the all to the Grizzel family.'  Shortly after it was
too late, they realized how dreadful it was to name a child in the
'Grisly Family' after the woman who opened the Box.  So they called
her Pan.  Nonetheless, teachers and other bureaucrats kept addressing
her as Pandora.  Children remembered.  Throughout her childhood Pan
suffered.  She hated the name.  She did not want to be the bringer of
mosquitoes.  As far as she was concerned, being called Pan or 'all'
was fine.  Besides becoming tough and sometimes violent, the long name
made her silent and reserved, or made her more silent and reserved
than she would have been.

Fortunately, her school taught her to use tools and she did well with
them.  Her tool-using classmates tended to be silent and reserved,
too.  They did not call her by her bad name.  She did not do so well
with the clerical and humanities subjects that were so important in
her mainstream culture.  But she was not going into the mainstream.

As soon as she had the opportunity, Pandora Grizzel changed her name
officially to Pan Grizzel.  It did not take long.  Every bureaucrat
and judge was sympathetic.

More importantly, silence, meaning no public relations disasters, good
marks in tool-oriented subjects, and extraordinary talent grabbed the
attention of those who hired astronauts.  They hired her and were
happy throughout her career with them.  She was technically good and
never a competitor on Earth.

Before retiring from the agency, she hired on to the Melians.  Eltis
picked her.  She knew Pan completely disregarded human-made
regulations and schedules.  But that was not her job.  Her job was to
understand and use non-human tools.

Part of her deal with the Melians was that she would not return to
Earth first, but stay in orbit.  The Melians had not yet developed
decent earth-to-orbit air augmented rockets, although they would
shortly.  So it was an advantage to hire someone already 'out there.'

Pan's direct boss saw the implementation of mini-magnetospheric
propulsion as the hottest advance in forty years.  It was not simply
the talk of fancy bureaucrats and politicians; it was real.  So he was
helpful.  He never mentioned to anyone else where she would be located
when she severed relations.  He merely suggested that as a shy person,
she would not care for a big going away party on Earth, and that none
of the more senior people should make plans.

Several people in Gelson's organization had known Pan for a long time.
The people in it had tried to design computer substrates for humans.
Among other knowledge, Pan knew quite a bit about stand-alone
computers.  She designed them to survive in harsher environments than
the Gelson people.  That was understandable.  Her machines had a lot
of power, too; they were built differently than the first slow,
radiation-resistant machines.  She was technically helpful.  So they
suggested she be reborn.

The first rebirth machine built at the Lagrangian point recorded Pan.
Since there were no other humans or robotic caregivers there, and
because she was sponsored by Gelson, she was also the first to be
reborn into an inorganic substrate.  Pan's brain was put into a human
body that had been force grown since the initial pattern came into
orbit disguised in an ash carrier.

Pan's was the first inorganic substrate to carry the mind of a human.
That helped Gelson.  Others thought that success came from using data
from Meldon's recorder as well as the lessons learned from the Todds'
AI project.

For Pan, the goal was that such a rebirth would avoid any
unpleasantness that came when data pressed onto an organic brain --
the people who underwent that kind of rebirth kept saying it was more
than merely 'unpleasant'; they hated the experience.

So far, the people who knew about the option and had the choice -- not
very many people -- chose to be reborn into an organic substrate, that
is to say, into a younger version of their own human body.

On the one hand, many believed that they possessed a non-material part
of themselves.  They found it hard to imagine such a soul might
manifest itself in an inorganic substrate.  But they were not going to
give up indefinite longevity simply because they did not want to shift
bodies.  So they invented the notion that the soul transferred when
they went into another, nearby biological body.  They had no evidence
one way or another, but that was neither here nor there.  At the same
time, most of those who expected to be reborn found it hard to believe
the salience of earlier reports.  "After all," they said to themselves
and to each other, "the process is being continually improved.
Doubtless, the first people did have a hard time.  But now it has
become regular."  Besides, they all knew many had survived far worse.

That meant that as a practical matter, they were willing to be reborn,
but they were not willing to jump away from their traditional biology.

But Pan was willing to shift.  Moreover, fortunately for her, it did
turn out that embedding her data into an inorganic substrate was no
different than copying computer memory.  The Gelson people had finally
done well.  In addition, she had no trouble with the interface between
the inorganic substrate that held her mind and the human body she
inhabited.  She had an easy time.

Many knew that Pan Grizzel suffered from too much radiation, that she
would die soon.  So when the Melian organization announced her death
in distant space, it was not unexpected.  Only a man named George paid
attention to a new, young employee called Tamra Vindel.

George was an intelligence analyst who never wanted anyone to learn
his last name, even though knowledge of it was irrelevant.  He liked
poking into other people's lives; he spent much of his time looking at
their opinions.  He figured that people with the same opinions as
himself were safe, they had 'sound opinions.'  Others might well be
dangerous.

Tamra Vindel had a different body than Pan Grizzel.  She looked
different.  Legally, she was a different person.  The new Tamra Vindel
did not care; even old Pan Grizzel did not like being part of the
'Grisly Family.'

If you tracked Vindel's papers back, they seemed to indicate she was
born in a country with lousy records.  That was common enough; much of
the world suffered from bad record keeping.  No one with any sense
held that identification should lead to authorization, regardless of
purpose.

The intelligence analyst told a co-worker that Vindel looked like a
younger version of the old woman who appeared to have died in rebirth;
but he was not sure.  She did not look exactly like a younger version,
but walked much the same as the older version.  As for Vindel's
history: it looked fine but George suspected that she had worked for
dicey organizations.  He figured that earlier they had faked her
documents.  She might not be who she appeared to be.  He could not
prove it; none of her history contradicted the story.  But the people
who supported it were all members of the Melior Movement.  George did
not think that a coincidence.  All in all, he doubted that she had
sound opinions.  He did think that the Melians had determined that she
was very good in space.  He had to agree; she was competent.  And she
was available for hire.  In any case, he decided she was more harmless
away from Earth than on it.  He did not look any further.

As for how Vindel had got into space, George and others presumed she
rode on the Melians' first air-augmented rocket.  That was wrong, but
no one knew that.  At the same time that Pan Grizzel turned into Tamra
Vindel, a copy of her knowledge was added to that already known by the
space ship's computer.

The 'Grace''s computer was never conscious, but with Pan's knowledge,
the Melians found that it could to do as well on its own as when Pan
ran it.  The former astronaut was not needed.  She ended up helping
with more difficult matters, in particular, with support for the
interstellar space ship.

Because she now had a nano-assembler in space, Eltis Akthorn came to
be perceived as powerful.  She could destroy Earth.  She would kill
herself at the same time.  There was a 'mutually assured destruction'
or MAD stand off between her and the major Earth powers.  Still, it
meant serious negotiation.  She talked with diplomats.

They wanted her particle beam devices out in Kuiper belt.  Since they
had or could easily obtain recorders and assemblers on and near Earth,
they could build defenses.  The militaries were not stupid, at least,
the relevant parts were not.  They wanted time.  Everyone knew that a
speed-of-light or near speed-of-light weapon did not give warning, but
the major governments planned to use spies and halt any attack before
it happened.  Eltis, of course, was not planning an attack; and her
words were believed.  But from a military point of view, it was not
her words but her capabilities that counted.

Tamra Vindel pointed out that particle beam devices could be powered
with electricity collected closer to the Sun or with miniature fusion
reactors.  Eltis saw that time was a cost.  Out in the Kuiper belt,
her replicators could build the very big solar collectors needed or
they could build many miniature fusion reactors and mine the helium
three to fuel them, but either solution would take a long time.

It would be quicker to build solar collectors closer to the Sun, to
convert the light to electricity and then to microwaves, to build
transmitters, to build receivers out in the Kuiper Belt, to build
rectifiers, and to power the particle beam devices that way.  It was
an exhausting list.  But she would not have to do the job.
Nano-assemblers could build highly complex items and spray-droplet
machines could build the rest.  Non-conscious computers could manage
the jobs.

Also as Vindel said, "In order to speed vehicles going to the Kuiper
belt, we need particle beam devices at Earth's distance from the sun.
Otherwise, a trip takes half a year because of the speed of the solar
wind."

But, as she said, "We do not need a huge amount of power.

"Unless it is pushed by a particle beam, the first space craft that
stops out there must take a long time to get there.  Regardless, it
can carry a nano-assembler and data to build a spray droplet machine.
It can build more nano-assemblers.  Spray-droplet machines and more
nano-assemblers can quickly build particle beam devices connected to a
heavy object; they can stop subsequent space craft.  But we have to
get the first space craft out there.

"As for where it should go: one or two particle beam devices in
Earth's orbit, at the forward Lagrangian point, will enable us to push
fast probes.  They can go out early and tell us where heavy objects
are before they rush on into interstellar space.  Or we can build big
telescopes."  They ended up doing both.

The particle beam devices were negotiable.  The militaries were not
worried about a few.  They were worried about a number that could win
a first strike against them.

The militaries did not care about telescopes.  At the same time the
Melians began using the telescopes to look for suitable Kuiper belt
objects, they started searching for a good candidate for the
Movement's planet.

No one argued with Eltis when she specified a planet in a star's
habitable zone.  She meant the liquid water zone.  Everyone wanted
that.  She wanted the planet to be in a more or less circular orbit;
that was desired, too.  And she said it should have a big moon.  The
moon would prevent too much axial shifting, but no one else cared.

Eltis did not know why she thought the last was important.  In human
terms, axial shifts took a long time, even when the humans lived
indefinitely long.  Still, she wanted to see a big moon.  'Maybe,' she
smiled to herself, 'it is an aesthetic desire!'

In any case, she decided that if necessary, she would drop one or
other of those conditions.  But she would not drop what she considered
the least likely but the most important condition, that the planet not
harbor complex life.

With replicators and mini-magnetospheric propulsion, the Movement
could readily build and transport the telescopes for an interferometer
as wide as needed.  Eltis knew that the wider the interferometer, the
higher the resolution, presuming enough photons got collected.  With a
wide enough interferometer, you could map continents at interstellar
distances.

But no one on or near Earth built an interferometer as wide as Earth's
orbit.  Instead, a smaller interferometer found a star not quite
thirty light years from Earth.  It had two planets in its habitable
zone.  Both planets enjoyed big moons; they could be and were
photographed.  The star itself showed spectral lines indicating it was
a G type, the same as Sol.  One of its planets reflected light that
showed absorption lines that suggested multi-cellular life.  The other
planet, closer in, did not.  However, its non-stable atmosphere
suggested microbes.

The multiple telescopes of the interferometer found another stellar
system a little more than four light years away from the first.  Even
though that star had a luminosity only a third that of Sol, and
therefore a much narrower habitable zone, a stable planet was found in
it.  The star showed spectral lines that said it was a K0, early among
the K types.  That meant it would not flare dangerously.  Humans might
live on the planet.  A biosphere was detected.

Eltis was not going to terraform the planet; but if it lacked
intelligent or near-intelligent entities, maybe Tuppak Nassik could
engineer human bodies to survive on it.  Anyhow, it was not going to
be the first.

The telescopes found yet another possible system.  It was closer to
Earth, although not by much.  Its terrestrial planet was in a
habitable zone but near its outer edge.  The planet had to be chilly.

Eltis decided that it was safer to ignore the system with the chilly
planet.  The system with two planets in its habitable zone would make
a good first destination.

Meanwhile, Filgard's recorder was used to collect the data on the
whole spaceship, the 'Grace', including its computer.  When she rode
in it, Pan had rebuilt it enough that recording it was easier to do
than understanding what she said she had done.

Peter's nano-assembler had made a big enough recorder.  Its
construction took time, but not a humanly impossible duration.  With
the data from the recording, the spray-droplet machines, along with
nano-assemblers to work on the more delicate parts, then made one
hundred copies.  That took even more time, but again, it was not too
long for the humans.

The copy of the first new space ship was again named 'Grace'.  Few
knew that the original had been destroyed and duplicated.  Pan Grizzel
had named the original because of the phrase 'grace under pressure.'
She liked that notion.  Others thought she named it because of the
phrase 'there but for the grace of God go I.'

Chapter 49
**********

Over time, Vallen discovered that Peter did not control whether or how
nano-assemblers were used.  In part, their reproduction was limited by
those who controlled them; and, in part, the instructions for building
them were not public.  They were not like instructions for building
Meldon's recorder.  Peter had never detailed what he did, although
that could now be found easily by anyone who had a nano-assembler and
recorder.

The Melior Movement had nano-assemblers, but did not make that widely
known.  Others who obtained instructions on building them kept the
instructions secret.  Few used them.

The assemblers meant that certain devices could be made cheaply,
including themselves.  However, if assemblers' production were
limited, what was produced could be sold at a high price.  What was
produced could be more assemblers; it could be anything else, like
drugs or computer chips.  Peter had not been the man who determined
those profits.  He had not been the man who determined losses, either,
as would happen when people could obtain as many material objects as
they wanted.  His murder did not effect Vallen one way or the other.

It took Vallen considerable time to recognize this.  It went against
his preconceptions, which were mostly based on movies.  Peter was a
great man; he had built a marvelous machine.  It should effect Vallen.
But it did not.  Eventually, the lack of impact made everything clear.

Then Vallen thought to himself, 'Peter's death might lead to a worse
world than if he had remained alive.  The man had been brilliant.  No
doubt about that.  Besides technical brilliance, he was a good team
leader.'  Vallen knew that few were brilliant with both technology and
people.  But Peter had the two capabilities.  The work Peter could not
do because he was dead might have helped everyone.  And Vallen was
responsible.

Vallen was carving a wooden hand as he thought this.  It was not a
face.  Recently, he had been carving faces and busts.  This was
different, a hand, not a face.  Vallen had not thought about the
change.  He had seen an interesting piece of drift wood on the beach,
picked it up, and took it home.

The wood in the hand, a right hand, showed lines which stretched from
wrist to fingers.  They were not human lines, but fit the carving.
The wood itself was tough.  It had been hardened by waves and sand and
solar bleaching.

In the carving, the fingers splayed a little, as if the hand were
reaching up, but not yet grasping.  At the beginning, Vallen employed
a semi-circular blade for the fairly large space between tip of the
ring finger and the little finger.  He needed a straight blade to cut
between the other fingers and to carve details on their front and
back.

The straight blade slipped and Vallen stared at his left wrist; he did
not feel any pain at all.  The knife was sharp and the blade small.
Nonetheless he bled badly.  He could have done something, but didn't.
He died.

Chapter 50
**********

On Earth, several powerful men decided to cooperate.  They knew their
incomes would not survive the price drop implied by assemblers -- they
thought of themselves as technological losers who did not want to go
down in defeat.

They all thought of the Melians as opposition revolutionaries.
Normally, none of the men would have cooperated.  Moreover, although
they knew each other well, none were dependent on another.  None was
subordinate; none could safely hurt another.  Generally, in business
they ignored each other, and only met socially.  This time, they
conspired.  They made up a name, 'The Conservators of Earth.'

They did not expect the Melians to leave.  They persuaded themselves
that the Melians were going out, organizing, and then coming back as
an even more organized power.  This was contrary to what the Melians
said, but the men thought the Melian leadership was lying.  The
'Conservators' thought the revolutionaries would stay and revolt.

Since the Melians had von Neumann replicators, recorders and
assemblers, they could build weapons.  The Melians could defend
themselves.  Consequently, to fight the Melians, a few of the more
military among the 'Conservators' decided their best chance was to
make a surprise, decapitating attack.

As for the attack itself: 'The Conservators of Earth' would have to
steal or manufacture a weapon.  They needed a nano-assembler, too.
Stealing was risky.  With appropriate instructions, they could
manufacture.  That would be better.

They did not have a nano-assembler, but as it happened, they only had
to bribe one person to provide them with directions for building their
own.

John Harriman had what he considered to be sound opinions.  After
being approached, he thought of the design as going to people with
equally sound opinions.  He liked calling himself a 'Conservator;' he
knew the word fit.  He was a 'Conservator.'  The organization was not
paying him for the design, which he would give, but for his risk.

The security system at Harriman's work failed.  The normal mantra had
three parts, the man, his knowledge, and what he carried.  It meant
checking the person, ensuring that he had a passphrase, and providing
him with a machine that showed a new, long number every half minute.
But Harriman did not try to disguise himself; he was himself.

The root cause of the failure came because of Harriman's beliefs.
Previously, the security people had found his opinions harmless.  They
gave him access and continued to give him access.  Harriman used it.

He instructed the nano-assembler to put information about itself on a
very small data packet.  The data packet was physical, so it took up
space, unlike the information it carried.  But it was silent.  It did
not broadcast.  The guards and their equipment were not looking for
it.

Harriman did have to give up a handkerchief.  The data took up a
volume smaller than a bacterium.  Without special sensors, it would
stay lost unless put on an identifiable piece of clothing.

The guard post carried a voice analyser.  It looked for unusual
stress.  To survive normally Harriman had to act calmly; consequently,
he had no trouble carrying his handkerchief and its data.  When he
emptied his pockets, he showed them his handkerchief, as he always
did.  A guard passed a wand over it.  Another asked boring questions,
the same as he always did, so the security computer could listen.
Harriman sounded as he usually did, a little irritated, a little
bored.

Using a recorder that they had already built from information that
Meldon's group had published, the powers copied the data along with
the handkerchief.  The recorder destroyed both the data packet and the
handkerchief.  A computer separated the two types of information, that
for reconstructing the handkerchief and that for building the
assembler.  The assembler data, now transformed, could be and was
converted to a set of prints that told how to build a nano-assembler
in the old way.  It was built.  That was expensive.  But then, after
it was built, the second and subsequent instances reproduced.  For a
regular individual, the whole effort would have been too expensive to
undertake.  But for the 'Conservators' it was not.

The organization could have given a duplicate of the handkerchief back
to Harriman, but never did.

An assembler was disguised in an emergency oxygen tank for an as yet
uncrewed satellite.  On Earth, the tank gave out oxygen when checked.
The test was not for long, of course, since space travelers might have
to depend on the oxygen carried.

Then, the disguised assembler was launched into orbit.  There it
latched into the station's electrical system, got much more power from
it, disassembled what was around it, except for what was necessary for
stealth, and manufactured a particle beam device.  It built the device
according to old, but workable specifications.  No one ever tested the
particle beam.  The device was expected to work and it did.  The
particles in the beam accelerated up to very nearly light speed.  The
attack was both unanticipated and undetectable.

The Earthly powers aimed at a Melian space station which, they
thought, held Eltis Akthorn and her senior lieutenants.  The attack
was intended, in the old phrase, to 'decapitate' the organization.
Because the leader's organizations were all hierarchical, and they
were at the top, and they felt they were necessary, they presumed that
if they killed Eltis and her senior lieutenants, that would be the end
of the Melior Movement.

Eltis was not on the satellite.  They killed Allen Intro, instead.

The artificial intelligence had completed his design of the
interstellar space ship.  He had radioed a copy out to the Kuiper Belt
where it would be built.  Eltis, who did not have anything to do,
except be present for those who cared, had headed towards one of the
recorders.  She had no job on or near Earth.

But to be present, and to maintain her status, Eltis planned to be
among the last biological humans to go unconscious.  She expected to
be recorded, sent as a dead data packet to the Kuiper Belt, added to
the interstellar space ship, travel to its destination, and then be
woken to choose the planet for terraforming.  She would fall asleep
before being recorded at Earth's leading Lagrangian point and wake by
the planet they hoped to call Melior.

The choice of planet had already been fairly well decided -- the inner
one, without complex life on it.  But Eltis and everyone else worried
lest they had misinterpreted the results of the telescopic survey.
The planets were distant from the solar system.

The final decision had to be made there.  Then, the machines could
wake a few more terraformers to tailor the procedures; they and she
would die again while the terraforming took place, and then they would
be woken yet again with all the others.  Eltis knew that the chance of
dying forever was low.  Like most others, she did not expect to suffer
when she was born again.

As the AI saw it, the core of the space ship consisted of a cylinder.
It was a little less than ten centimeters long and two centimeters in
diameter.  That cylinder would consist of the dead data packets of all
the Melians, the dead packets of all the bugs, plants, and animals,
the information about the books, art, and instruments that would go to
another star; and the needed fusion reactors, assemblers, computers,
sensors, and effectors,

The cylinder would be buried inside a ball of solid hydrogen and
liquid helium three -- well, it was shaped differently than a ball,
but the AI figured that the total consumed a bit less than five cubic
meters.  It was like a ball two meters in diameter.

The hydrogen would serve as one source for the continuing plasma.
During the voyage, the speeding space ship would collect more from the
interstellar medium.  The helium three would provide the energy for
the fusion reactors.  He figured that more than half the sensors and
mechanisms for generating the plasma would erode during the trip, as
would much of the solid hydrogen that did not become plasma, but the
vitals would survive.

When the space facility turned to an expanding vapor cloud, the
attackers thought they had killed Eltis Akthorn.  They did not know
that Allen Intro had been still alive or that he was creating his
second AI, Attun Infel.

No one else knew about Attun either.  Intro had not passed on the
information yet.  While he himself was being cooked and turned into
vapor, Intro ejected Attun into the shadow produced by the expanding
vapor.  It served as a shield.

However, Attun was left floating in space with no extra mass.  He
could not maneuver himself.  He had to wait or be picked up.  The only
kind of signalling he would dare was directional.  Even though the
expanding cloud of vapor shielded him from the attack, he feared they
had other receivers.

But without extra mass, he could not build any kind of antenna or
reflector.  He could not build a visible light or IR laser either.
The vacuum around him was a 'whole lot of nothing', as Eltis had said.
He knew he would drift to a small planetoid.  That would provide him
with enough mass.  But it would take awhile.

Fortunately, he wanted to see what happened on Earth.  He knew he
could slow down his thinking, so he did not fear boredom.  He expected
Melian visitors eventually.  So he was not unhappy about his fate.

Allen Intro's first duplicate had been Arden Infel.  After Allen Intro
was killed, Arden thought he was the only AI left.  He did not know
about Attun.  Fortunately, Arden had all of Allen Intro's knowledge.
He was a duplicate of Allen's mind as well as his matter.

For safety, Arden duplicated himself immediately, creating Auller, and
sent the duplicate out to the Kuiper Belt.  Arden figured that at
least one of them would get to Melior.  If both did, which he hoped,
that would be fine, too.

Moreover, since it was easy for a nano-assembler, the dead data
packets of the million people and everything else had already been
duplicated several times.  The attack destroyed an irrelevant set --
the one by Allen Intro that he had been using in his design.  Copies
of the packets had already been sent to the Kuiper Belt to be built
into the interstellar space ship,

Initially, Filgard showed more of a grim understanding of what was
going on than anyone else.  Almost at once, he understood that the
Earthly weapon had been built by assembler and could be destroyed by
one.  An assembler was a disassembler.

Filgard teamed with Tuppak Nassik, who persuaded him to build and
launch thirty-two.  One of the thirty-two, Tuppak said, might get
through, fight the attacker's assembler, win, and disassemble
everything.

Both knew not to launch the disassemblers directly at the weapon.
That was too obvious.  In addition, they had to be stealthed.  Tuppak
had them hidden in rocks of the right temperature.  That would confuse
the humans.

The idea was that rocks would be launched into an orbit that would
pass near to, but not directly collide with the attacker's main
weapon.  Since no one had yet catalogued all the streams in the solar
system, no one would surprised to detect a bunch of rocks in orbit
near, but not directly colliding with the main weapon.  At least that
was Tuppak's hope.

The plan was that when close, the disassemblers would throw off their
disguises and head directly to the weapon.  Filgard figured that out.
He designed the outsized solar voltaic cells and propulsion systems so
the disassemblers could move quickly.  The idea was that they would
overwhelm the station's near defenses.

At the same time, in case this plan failed, both had machines start
building energy collectors and particle beam weapons on planetoids
much closer to Earth than those in the Kuiper Belt.  Both Filgard and
Tuppak knew that the distant ones which already existed could not
focus well enough to carry any noticeable energy to a small target.

At thirty times the distance from Earth to the Sun, they could deliver
a gigawatt onto a magnetospheric plasma with a radius of 300
kilometers.  That is why the interstellar space ship depended on an
expanding plasma.  In itself, it was very small.  Even the uncrewed
satellite used as the weapon platform, vastly bigger than the space
ship, could intercept and receive hardly any energy from the distant
projectors.

Because the rocks had different sizes and were shaped irregularly, and
because all the assemblers and spray-droplet machines that could
produce holders for them were working full out, Tuppak asked Tamra to
tie them into the hold of a spaceship and push them out one at a time.

The goal was that when detected the rocks would look like yet another
orbiting stream.

The rocks were blown up anyhow.

Even without a suspicion, the military men who controlled the
satellite exploded nuclear devices near each rock.  They wanted to be
careful.

Also, because it was not on any record to which they had access, the
military men used the particle beam device to vaporize Tamra's space
ship, which was on its way home.  They intended a message to the
Melian survivors: you can cooperate or you can die.

At first, it looked harder to obtain the fission core of each hydrogen
bomb than to obtain the directions for building their first assembler.
No one found it hard to purchase the lithium and deuterium for each
bomb.

However, one of the leading 'Conservators' owned a company which
controlled several nuclear power plants.  He was able to get a hold of
radioactive waste; he claimed he was setting up yet another company to
dispose of it.  Everyone around him presumed his lawyer had come up
with another tax scam.  They provided him with the radioactive waste
immediately; paperwork to come later.

An assembler was able to construct another machine to make slugs that
could fit into both it and another assembler's cavity and be
sufficiently shielded so only a tolerable amount of radiation would
escape.

The disassembler separated the elements necessary for fission cores
from the shielded waste -- essentially, it converted the shielded
slugs into more shielded slugs plus those elements -- and then
assembled the atomic bombs used as cores.  It separated the lithium
into two hunks of isotope and constructed the lithium deuteride that
got detonated.  Again, the design was old; but the bombs were expected
to explode and did.  Secrecy intended to prevent lesser nations and
people from building atomic weapons did not apply to the
'Conservators' leaders.

The bombs were launched on rockets from a hidden location on Earth.
An assembler constructed the rockets from very old plans that had been
converted to a format it could handle.  The blasts destroyed thirty
one of the thirty two disassemblers.  Indeed, the explosions vaporized
eleven.  They heated and irradiated the two remaining so strongly that
the computers checking damage did not doubt.  The thirty-second rock
looked fried, but the dissassembler in it was hurt, not killed.

In any case, the battle damage assessment program determined that the
thirty-second rock would not go near the weapon satellite being
protected.  Along with five others, the nuclear burst had diverted it
enough so it would intercept Earth's atmosphere first.

No one anticipated that the rock would be sufficiently solid that it
would not break apart in the atmosphere; no one expected the
disassembler inside it to survive entry.

The disassembler crashed onto ground, not into the ocean.  In
retrospect, that improbable event looked beneficial, but not at the
time.  The disassembler had been damaged by the nuclear explosion and
by its crash.  It could not assemble at all.  But it had not been
totally broken.  It started to disassemble its surroundings.

Fortunately, it was not a replicator.  Unfortunately, it could
disassemble quickly.

By the time Earth's proper defenses had destroyed it, the damage it
caused was enough to bring on an ecological collapse within another
generation.  Moreover, the 'Conservators of Earth' had became the
'Destroyers of Earth.'

Quite possibly, the collapse would have come anyhow, but not as
quickly.  The ecosystem as a whole amplified a small disturbance into
one bigger and much more calamitous.  The damage acted as a trigger.

But even before the 'Conservators' became the 'Destroyers', the other
Earthly powers grew more afraid of the Melians.  None thought the
Melians would intentionally damage Earth.  Rather, they might hurt the
planet inadvertently, a prediction which unfortunately proved true.

So the proper Earth authorities told their militaries to defeat the
'Conservators', and to do so quickly and publicly.  The 'Conservators'
could no longer hide.  The Earth authorities hoped to convey a message
to the Melians and did so -- late, but not too late.

The war ended.

The winning Earth powers promised not to attack any of the Melians;
they said the Melians could leave.  In turn, the Melians promised not
to retaliate and not to sabotage what they left behind.

It was a standoff.

Tamra was dead.  She had never backed herself up, even though it was
easy for her to do so.  Unlike the other biological humans, her mind
was embedded in an inorganic substrate.  Like the AIs, or any other
computer, it was easy to copy.  She just had not considered a need,
and then when she did, it was too late.  Her initial data pack still
existed; it was from Pan Grizzel.  A copy would have to be made from
it.  But her personal memories by Earth as Tamra Vindel were lost
forever.

Tuppak did not like this; and he did not like to have gone along with
a plan that caused damage to Earth's ecosystem, even if it had been
inadvertent.  That another group had attacked first, that was
irrelevant.

Filgard, meanwhile, saw the damage to Earth as leading the other Earth
powers to defeat the bad guys.  He thought that was a good result.  As
for Tamra's death forever, he still did not believe in rebirth.  He
still expected himself to die forever.  In a war, he expected young
people to die.  He did not know Tamra personally, so as far as he was
concerned, her death was distant statistic.

Meanwhile, Filgard, Tuppak, and Eltis made copies of themselves.
Eltis was the last of the biological humans to do so.

Copies of their data went out to the Kuiper Belt.  Arden traveled
conscious; he was small for the vehicle and could take the
acceleration.  In fact, he was not needed.  A smart, but non-sentient
robot handled everything.  Arden slowed his thinking.

Auller was not needed either.  When Arden slowed, his duplicate,
Auller, copied himself, checked to make sure the data packets were
good -- like the people and the rest, copies were sent even further
out, for safety -- and turned himself off.  If a secret, non-sentient
computer did not receive the right message from Melior in one hundred
fifty years, it would decide he had not arrived and turn him back on.
Auller hoped that would never happen.  He wanted his consciousness to
come alert away from Earth.

A little later, Arden did the same.  The interstellar space ship left.

Chapter 51
**********

_After one-hundred twenty years' travel, the interstellar space ship
arrived._

When Eltis came alive again, a computer voice quickly told her, "You
have been dead during the crossing; we have reached the new stellar
system successfully."

She sighed.  She lived -- she had not been sure of that -- and they
had travelled.

The computer went on, "Cosmic rays killed a few people, but none are
critical to our success.  Data and assemblers survived.  They built
us."

She sighed again.  They could create the colony.

"We are orbiting the inner planet of the two in the habitable zone.
It has single celled life on it, but none complex.  The other planet
has complex life.  We correctly interpreted the Earthly telescopic
observations."

It was Arden speaking.

"From a distance, the second planet looks like Earth with a different
geography.  Close up you can see differences.  Many of the bigger
forms have six legs rather than four.  Both planet's information
carrying substances, their genetic material, are different from any on
Earth although similar to each other."

She could not focus properly.  She felt terrible.  The computer
suggested she clean up.  She stumbled as she got out of bed and fell
painfully.  By then her vision had cleared.  That was good.

But she decided not to clean up and got into bed again.  "Don't
suggest to anyone else that they get up immediately.  My eyes have
started focusing better, but I don't know of my other nervous
connections."

"That is what Tuppak Nassik said back by Earth.  But neither Auller
nor I had any trouble when we were rebuilt and rewoke.  Non-sentient
computers have improved you.  Already, you are speaking a new
language; I am sure you can add numbers in base twelve, too."

Eltis could add in base twelve; she had not been able to do that
before.  And she was speaking in the new, common language.  She had
not noticed.

The computer continued, "Your rapidly improved vision tells me you
were helped by the change to the optic connections.  Unfortunately,
your falling down means the other changes did not work out as well."

Eltis said, "At least, I can see, hear, and talk."  "Yes," said the
AI, "hearing has been understood for a generation.  Not even Tuppak
complained about imaginary noises.  We figured out how to enable you
to see.  And talking is resilient.  Why that is, I don't know; it is
fortunate."

Eltis made little movements in bed.  She raised one arm and put it
down; raised the other.  'My muscles are not jerking uncontrollably,'
she thought.  'I suppose all this should be considered positively.'

Tuppak Nassik was the next person to wake.  Eltis watched from the
next bed.  He opened his eyes but stayed without moving.  He lay on
his back.  After a short time, swinging his eyes around, he said, "My
eyes now can focus about a meter and a half away.  I cannot focus on
distant objects."

Eltis could, but she could not remember when she started to focus in
the distance, too.  Then she realized that she could reconstruct her
recent past.  "In a very little while, you should be able to focus at
any distance," she said to Tuppak.

"Good," he said.  And to the computer, he said, "We need something to
focus on that is above me and not too far away.  How is my speaking?"

"You are speaking well," said the computer.  "Presumably your hearing
is fine.  Please try moving your arms and then your legs.  Eltis had
trouble initially."

"This is a great deal better than it was," said Tuppak, "more
comfortable ..." Eltis ground her teeth; she did not think it was
comfortable, "but," Tuppak continued, "I am sure it is not like your
coming awake or like Pan Grizzel."

"No," said the AI, "both Auller and I came alert immediately.
Everything was the same.  You do not notice a blink.  If it had not
been for the change in location, we would not have noticed either.

"We are going to wake up Pan Grizzel as Tamra Vindel in an inorganic
substrate, just as we did before.  That should be easy, too.  She will
be a bit confused because her memory is that of Pan Grizzel and she
expects to wake up near Earth.  We will have to tell her that that
instance of her died without back up and it is now ten dozen years
later.  We are in a new stellar system.  She will be able to access
the external information about Tamra, but not what she herself
experienced."

The AI went on.  "After choosing which planet, terraforming will be
the big job.  But Tamra will think up improvements in planet-to-orbit
rockets and in human-carrying interplanetary vehicles.  They already
exist, but I bet she will think of yet more changes.  Besides, I doubt
we will have to move four gross at a time from one planet to another;
except for classes of students, it will be more like four or eight.
We do not have a design yet for that small an interplanetary
spaceship.

"Meanwhile, we are in a spinning space station in orbit around the
inner planet.  At the moment, it is the only place you biological
humans can live without a space suit."

Eltis looked down.  She realized that she could not be looking through
a window; the image was not spinning around.  Then, she realized, she
was not even looking at a screen.

"Ah ..." said the AI, "I have been projecting the image internally."

"Yes.  That makes sense.  I know the theory," said Eltis, "and I
expect people to get accustomed quickly.  But in the meantime, please
display on an external, physical screen.  That way, people can adapt
more easily.  A separate issue: does this space station have a true
window looking on the universe outside?"

"No," said the computer.  "It should," said Eltis.  "The universe will
whirl around.  That does not matter.  And most will not care.  Having
one, even if they never look through it, that is what counts.  We
don't need it right away; I am not going to look through it.  But you
can have one of the assemblers build it."

Eltis looked thoughtful.  "Something else: you can put the external
screen above people you wake.  That will give them something to focus
on, which Tuppak suggested."

On the planet below, Eltis saw, the mountains were bare; they did not
even have mud on them.  Zooming in -- it was easy to do when she used
internal viewing -- she could see dust collected in valleys.  Rain had
washed the mountains bare; what the water carried settled in valley
bottoms and slowly turned to rock.  When the water evaporated, the top
layers became dust.  In places where it looked to have rained
recently, the dust flats looked muddy or were replaced by lakes.

Only the desert areas reminded Eltis of Earth.  On both planets, she
thought, water shaped the land, but did not come very often.

The planet teemed with single celled life.  In the wetter areas, Eltis
could see its lakes take on wonderful shades and swirls of red and
green and yellow.  The life on top of the water was a scum -- that is
what it was called, Eltis discovered, but the word did not have an
unpleasant connotation.  The scum reflected those colors.  The other
colors, those absorbed, were used for photosynthesis.  It was not the
same photosynthesis as on Earth; the biochemical paths were different.
But the net effect was the same, energy for the microbes.

Eltis almost did not want to kill them, but it was a choice between
her life and their lives.  The microbes could not defend themselves,
not against the Melian replicators and terraformers.

The next planet out had complex life; that she would leave as is.

Decades of travel could take her to the next closest planet both dead
and able to be terraformed.  It was near the outer edge of its
habitable zone.  She did not want to go there.  This was the best
place.

She knew that everyone else presumed this planet would be terraformed
and be called Melior.  The decision on a name had been made on Earth
-- actually, no one had truly made a decision, it had simply been
assumed that the Melior Movement would settle on Melior.

Anyhow, the beautiful scum had to go.

She would consult with a few others.  They had been Earth ecologists
mostly and were now terraformers.  Eltis felt she was not deciding
anything, merely confirming a decision made long before.  She knew
what they and she expected.

After tweaking the Melior terraforming, Tuppak Nassik designed bodies
for the second planet out, called Tegmar, and for another fewer than
five light years away, called Farhaven.

After Tamra Vindel designed the new space craft and the new earth to
orbit ships, she left the Melior system with Avlen Ipdol and with
Martha and Vogel Todd.  The latter had specified that when they
reached Melior, they, too, were to be woken into inorganic substrates.

Avlen Ipdol was another AI, fathered and mothered by Arden and Auller,
who 'mixed their memories.'

The three humans and the AI planned to travel interstellar distances
slowed down but alert.  The procedure added mass to their vehicle,
since their computer minds, sensors, and effectors were much larger
than their dead data packets.  Still, the four added little mass.  And
around Melior, no Earth government prevented them from building large
energy converters and pushers.

They agreed to make their first trip, taking about a dozen and a half
years real time, in only two hours subjective time.  The humans found
the time too long for human-speed senses to see stars move, although
it was obvious after a few minutes that they had.  Everyone could see
motion with computer-speed senses.

The four took everything that had come to Melior, including copies of
the people, but they did not wake up any of the people.  They did not
duplicate themselves either.  They were, after all, misanthropes.
Four was a good number.  But each made use, even the AI, of the huge
store of cultural data they carried.  It was no trouble to extract the
information from the data packets and present it virtually in a manner
than looked real.

Gilbert Daveson Hagborn dropped his middle name.  He called himself
Gilbert Hagborn and became Jeltong Pekbung's deputy.  For a very long
time, he was the number two man in both the Conservative Party and the
government; then he became head.

Filgard became a farmer, the primary farmer for the capital city.  He
thought of himself as 'cultivating his garden' although he did not do
any cultivation himself.  His robots did.

He deeply regretted that Fairta died too soon.

He regretted that his neighbor, James Bevin had not made it.  The man
had finally decided that the Melians were decent and right, had joined
the movement, been recorded, and then on the trip his data pack was
hit by a cosmic ray and he was killed.  The man had not been important
enough to be backed up.  (Filgard never thought himself and was never
told that he was considered important and had been doubled.)

In the new language, which Filgard enjoyed thinking and speaking,
'James' would be spelt 'Djaems' and he would have needed a single
syllable middle name to produce the four syllables of an official
Melian name.

Taffod Dowwen got the chance to endanger only himself and did so.  He
talked about it.  Because people liked his stories, he became a
national treasure, which meant he could duplicate himself into
multiples rather than simply extend his own life.

Gammae Uttles became even better at helping people be reborn into a
biological substrate.

The attack on the Melians as they left was not a secret but was seldom
discussed.  Most people did not learn of it, but Djaeds Summervil did.
He became scared and joined the Earth Beware party.