Jon Foy hadn't said a lot during lunch. Physics and technical issues were clearly not his line. Afterward, Cavan excused himself, saying he had things to take care of elsewhere. Foy steered Keene aside, presumably getting down finally to the matter that had been the object of bringing Keene to Foundation. Mylor Vorse joined them.
They ascended in an elevator from the underground part of the Congressional complex and walked a short distance to what appeared to be Foy's workplace—a combination of study and office located in one of the pinnacles by the Hexagon, like a turret flanking the keep of an ancient castle. The suggestion of Gothic sombreness outside was enhanced by the fortress-like lines of the structures outlined in the lights beyond the windows, and the dim form of a nearby crater rim, craggy and black like a Transylvanian skyline against the red-streaked clouds.
The inside, by contrast, was bright and colorful, with an L-shaped desk console facing a mini-conference arrangement of chairs set around a low table, a larger worktable to one side, and a mixture of artwork and Earth scenes surrounding several display screens on the walls. A miniature flower and rock garden stood in a planter below, and the wall opposite the window carried an array of bookshelves—now rare on account of the uneconomic use of space and the effect of more convenient technologies. A large, black, long-haired cat opened its eyes to survey the newcomers suspiciously from a chair by the work table. After a few moments it lost interest, yawned, and went back to sleep.
Foy grinned as he followed Keene's gaze from the bleak scene outside, then back to the interior. "I need the window to remind me that there's still a real universe out there that we need to be concerned about," he said. "It's easy to become focused on the immediate and the immaterial if one's attention is always directed inward—down underground."
"What's the farther-away and the material, then?" Keene asked.
"For a start, a whole world to rebuild. The world that you last saw as radar images scanned through a cloud canopy"—Foy gestured at the window—"a bit like that outside. Would you like to see what's been happening back there?" Before Keene could answer, Foy voiced a command to the room's house manager and motioned toward the table set at a T with his desk. Keene took a chair facing the display wall as one of the screens came to life. Vorse sat down across a corner from him. Foy himself remained standing.
"This is the latest from the probes that we've been keeping in high orbit," Vorse commented. It sounded as if this had been intended—not something that had just occurred to Foy in response to Keene's question.
Earth still looked much as it had from the shuttle in orbit after the escape from Mexico—a dark ball of smoke and cloud stirred into whorls and streamers by storms that could still be ferocious in places. But the chasms cutting down into the murk were less pronounced and sharp than they had been, indicating that the winds were dropping. Debris from Athena's tail was coalescing into the beginnings of a visible ring system. The last time Keene had talked to Charlie Hu, estimates were that the rings would take several centuries or more to decay away.
A pattern in pale blue appeared superposed on the globe, outlining the familiar oceans and continents as they had existed through recorded history. Then a new set in red added themselves, showing the reconstructions from radar mapping of the surface as it had become. Keene still found the implications as stupefying as if he were seeing such images for the first time. Foy and Vorse remained silent, giving him a moment to absorb the meaning fully.
He was looking, literally, at the birth of a new world. It was now no longer questioned that the whole theory of planetary geology as it had been accepted on Earth would have to be rewritten from the beginnings. In the course of three years—and mostly in the early part of that!—Earth's surface had undergone changes which according to the previous doctrine should have taken hundreds of thousands of years or even more to unfold. But the doctrine had been wrong. What had been taken as evidence of slow processes operating over immense spans of time had turned out to be results of a period of relative quiescence between cataclysmic upheavals during which mountains rose, continents were split asunder, and oceans raged across the landscapes, renewing the world not once but several times within the span of human experience. The trifling measures of erosion, sedimentation, and plate movements wrongly extrapolated back to yield time scales in the order of millions of years were just the final, dying phases of events that had happened with terrifying speed—like shrinking puddles and trickles in ditches as all that remains to tell of yesterday's storm.
Earth's passage through Athena's magnetosphere had induced enormous electrical currents in the metal-bearing regions of the mantle and crust, producing heat that had opened up rifts and poured lava sheets over huge expanses of the surface, melted much of the polar ices, and in some places caused the seas to boil. But then, sudden cooling under the pall of smoke and dust from widespread surface conflagrations fed by Jovian hydrocarbons had caused massive precipitations of snow and ice from the saturated atmosphere, in some areas hundreds of feet deep within days. With the Earth's axis shifted ten degrees, new polar regions were appearing, centered on northern Alaska and the area south of Africa, and a corresponding shift and tilt was anticipated for the yet-to-emerge climatic bands. Sea level had not altered significantly. The changes that had occurred in coastlines were due mainly to the lateral movements, uplifts and depressions, of land masses.
Athena's main gravitational effect had been a jolting of the Earth's rotation, producing a general pattern of north-south fracturing of the crust. (The similar alignment of major preexisting rifts and mountain chains was likewise attributed to the earlier Venus encounters.) The American continent was generally broader, less pinched in the middle, and shortened. To the north, the still-forming ice cap closed the Pacific, bridging to Siberia apparently on top of a plateau formed by the squeezing out of existence of what had been the Bering Strait. Farther south, the Caribbean was a system of swampy lakes with an arm extending up into the former American Midwest, while the Panama isthmus had broadened toward the Pacific. Land west of the San Andreas fault had not sunk into the Pacific as celebrated in the popular mythology of years, but instead hinged outward to become part of a new land area of uplifted seabed fringed by a chain of mountainous overthrust to the west. On the inland side, the Gulf of California had opened and extended, reaching almost to the wastes of ash and cooling lava fields that covered the sites where Seattle and Vancouver had stood. South America too, had broadened west of the Andes, but to the east large tracts of Argentina were submerged, leaving a truncated mountain spine crumbling into a chain of islands.
The Atlantic had changed beyond recognition. In both the northern and southern basins, large portions of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge had risen to become new, elongated islands of almost subcontinental proportions, with smaller groups forming a chain curving eastward around the tip of Africa to the shifted and reforming South Polar ice sheet. Except that the tip of Africa was no longer where it had been before. Like California's gulf, the Great African Rift had opened into a new arm of ocean cutting north through the Middle East and cleaving Jordan and Syria before curving east to join the Caspian Sea. West of this new arm of ocean, the main body of Africa was pivoting north on huge upswelling lava flows, piling crust and sediment into a coastal mountain chain separated only by narrows from the Mid-Atlantic islands in the south, and in the north forming a mountain barrier below the lakes that were all that was left of the Mediterranean. The eastern side of Africa, meanwhile, had become a jagged peninsula thrusting south from Arabia and bordering an archipelago of new islands extending to a much-elongated India.
Farther east, the western Pacific trench system had propagated southward and cut Australia in two. The western portion, again following the general pattern of north-south shock lines imparted by Athena, was swinging northwest into the Indonesian region to produce an incredible tangle of islands, lakes, land bridges, and channels, while the eastern part seemed to be merging into an area of new southwest Pacific uplift that embraced most of the former island groups and New Zealand.
Although still vastly greater than anything remotely suspected previously, the motions of the new fragmenting and merging tectonic plates were already slowing measurably. It seemed that a new mini-continent was beginning to form in the southwest Pacific, with the west part of Australia destined to become a southern extension of Asia. Elsewhere, the widening of the African rift northward showed signs of meeting another fault opening down from the Siberian coast and dividing the Eurasian land mass to create what might become a new ocean. A number of studies had produced maps of how the face of Earth might evolve over the centuries ahead—all of them highly speculative.
Seeing all this brought back feelings that Keene had experienced in the shuttle above Earth as he watched the false-color radar images change hour by hour, telling their story of cities disappearing beneath mile-high walls of advancing water, nations consumed by infernos of burning air hot enough to melt stone, humans and animals dying in billions. Even now, what else might be happening below the veil of dust and vapor could only be guessed at.
"How low have the probes gone?" he asked finally, forcing his eyes away and looking at the other two. "Are there any signs of survivors?" In his numbness it was the automatic thing to say. He didn't really think so. Any such news would have been known immediately all over Kronia.
Vorse shook his head. "We put landers down at a few places. The views they sent back could have been from Hades." He shrugged as if to say all was still not lost. "But the fraction of the surface that we've sampled has been tiny. There could be other conditions elsewhere."
"Our kind has survived comparable events before," Foy put in. "And they didn't possess the technical resources that the industrialized world had. It's early days yet, Dr. Keene." The cyclic theme of old worlds destroyed and new worlds being born recurred in the myths of ancient cultures as far back as they were recorded. The Biblical Old Testament was not alone in its injunction to go forth and replenish the Earth.
"Rebuilding it should go a lot faster this time," Keene said. "Kronia was never here before to direct things. We've got a repository of knowledge that won't have to be discovered all over again."
Foy gave him a long, contemplative look before replying, as if evaluating if this were the moment to broach whatever he'd had in mind in bringing Keene here. Finally, he said, "What we're looking at, Dr. Keene, isn't just the prospect of rebuilding civilization. Because of a quirk in recent times that led to the coming together of some extraordinarily gifted people, the circumstances that we have here at Kronia are unique in the history of human existence. As a consequence, we have the chance to found a civilization unlike anything that has existed before—the kind of civilization that visionaries through the ages have imagined, but which have defied all attempts to turn into reality. Some have concluded that it must always be so: that the harsh rules of reality and human nature make them permanently impossible dreams. But we believe otherwise. We believe that the forced cooperation that has been vital to survival out here at Kronia has produced a workable system of human values that could never have happened in the violent, competitive conditions that governed the development of cultures on Earth. If we can import that system back to Earth, maybe we'll be able to shape a civilization fundamentally different from any that emerged there before, rooted in the same ethic of mutual need and the inherent value of everyone as a unique individual that guides us here." He shrugged. "And if there do turn out to be survivors there, perhaps we can steer their early development in the same direction, before they begin increasing in numbers and organizing themselves into the old, eternal patterns of power rivalries and conflict."
"Who are 'we'?" Keene asked, picking up on Foy's use of the word. "Who decides these things?"
"Those of us who try to consider where our longer-term destiny might lie, beyond just muddling through from one century to the next," Foy replied. "After the present crisis has faded to become just another detail on the cosmic backdrop. When a new race has emerged that isn't divided within itself because of the inherently hostile nature of all its human relationships. Each against all. Take as much as you can in return for as little as you can get away with. That was the underlying rule that drove everything of importance on Earth, was it not? 'Good business.' 'Astute politics.' How could a sentiment like that ever mold and hold together a civilization capable of moving out among the stars?"
Keene took a moment to adjust to the new dimension that the conversation was taking on. What Foy was talking about now went far beyond just an experiment in organizing a complex, technological society on an alternative basis to the monetary incentive that most people on Earth had regarded as self-evidently unavoidable.
Foy completed Keene's thought as if he had been expecting it. "Sometimes our system is described as having invented what amounts to a new form of currency: a trade in the recognition of competence. And in some way it turns out to be a very superior currency. It can't be counterfeited, or stolen, or hoarded—for how can you fake skill or knowledge that you don't possess, take away another person's once they have it, or give it to someone who hasn't earned it? So corruption of the kind that comes with the power to steal legally or to bribe is impossible. And so does enslaving another person to create wealth for your own benefit—for with our kind of wealth the only one who could become rich is the slave."
Keene had heard the analogy before, but he let Foy carry through without interruption. For years, Earth's experts had insisted that Kronia would never last. When it not only lasted but grew and attracted more numbers, they said it was only through dependence on Earth, and they tried cutting the flow of material supplies to prove it. But the restrictions only served to make Kronia more self-reliant sooner.
Foy went on, "But that was said by Terrans who could only think in terms of a model based on economics. Earth was fixated on economics. It had become the global religion, dominating every aspect of life." He waved a hand. "Providing for material needs is important, of course, like eating. But like eating, it merely provides a foundation to support higher things. Look at earlier cultures and their works. Earth had brought everything down to the level of the foundation. It ate compulsively, all the time, with no other purpose."
"An entire Earth culture modeled after Kronia?" Keene said. It was plain enough that this was what Foy meant, but Keene needed a moment to reflect on it. It hadn't been long ago when Grasse and Valcroix were telling him that the Kronian system couldn't survive much more of even the colony's own growth.
"Not just Earth. Beyond it," Foy replied. "I already said, a culture capable for the first time of reaching for the stars." He waited for a few seconds, then grinned at the expression on Keene's face. "The conditioning of a Terran upbringing still shows, Dr. Keene. Forget the dogmas you heard repeated all around you every day of your life back there. This is perhaps the only system that could hold up on such a scale." Foy made a palm-up gesture with one hand. "How far did Earth's space programs get on its shopkeeper economics after the military incentives went away? Some corporate exploitation of the Moon. A couple of pilot bases on Mars that never amounted to more than glorified field laboratories. No profit. No aims beyond continuing the safe accumulation of capital." He shrugged. "And in any case, profit is a poor substitute for a motivation that will fire the passions of a whole culture. I'm talking about what can only be called spiritual—the kind of drive that inspired Europe of the High Middle Ages to create its soaring cathedrals and spurred the spread of Islam from India to Spain. The spirit that expresses belief in something beyond individual existence, larger than the individual, that will endure long after the individual has gone and give meaning to the life that was dedicated to it."
"You're making it sound like a new Kronian religion," Keene said.
Foy glanced at Vorse and inclined his head in a way that said he didn't entirely disagree. "Something that plays the role that religion once did, anyway. A universal sense of purpose, a quest that will spur a new Renaissance. Except that this Renaissance will be driven by visions of reality, not myth. All religions founded on myth eventually collapse when the myth is exposed." He paused for a moment. "And what I see playing that role is something that I know is very important to you, Dr. Keene.
"I'm tempted to say 'science,' but I don't mean the dead husk of true inquiry that the word had come to mean in Earth's institutionalized orthodoxies. I mean the free, creative process that functions within and as part of a universe that it recognizes as itself alive—not some soulless observer of a dead machine. What science should have been. The driving force that by now would already have carried us across the Solar System, instead of selling out to the power structure as the European Church did before it, and allowing itself to be conscripted to serve politics and commerce. I've talked to Sariena and Gallian. They know you. It was what you stood for through your whole life back there."
Keene nodded distantly. Had the human race been spread out and expanding in the way that Foy described, instead of concentrated in one place, the effects of Athena would have been far less calamitous. As things were, only the lucky fact of Kronia's existence had stood between civilization being obliterated completely, and the future that Foy was painting now. "Is that to be the God of your new religion, then, Jon?" he asked. "Life?"
"Life and love of every creative thing a human being stands for and is capable of achieving," Foy answered. "When Earth replaced the old gods of living nature with its mechanistic science, it reduced nature to inanimate matter running according to mechanical laws, within which life became a pointless accident, thought was no more than a byproduct of life, and morality an invention of wishful thinking. The gods that the new priesthood served were not knowledge or wisdom, but better technologies for accelerating the acquisition of material wealth through legalized theft and violence." Foy looked at Vorse briefly as if for confirmation and tossed out a palm again. "And why not? All other meaning and purpose had been stripped away. The only aspect of individual worth that was recognized and rewarded was efficacy in contributing to profits. No wonder so many knew intuitively that their lives had the potential for better things, and rebelled. That was what drove the migration to Kronia."
"So is that what you see as Kronia's purpose?" Keene asked. "To go out and become part of a living universe?"
"Whatever is in its nature to become," Foy replied. "The High Cultures that have emerged through human history are themselves living organisms that appear, grow, flourish, and eventually die. Each possesses its own unique soul. In the course of its lifetime, everything that a culture produces—its arts; its religion; its mathematics, its sciences; its philosophy and world view, works and constructions—all are an expression of that soul. It can be no other way. Like any organism, it has no choice but to actualize the imperative that's inherent in its nature. Kronia will become what it is destined to become."
"Becoming one with God?"
"I suppose you could look at it that way."
Keene was surprised to hear himself talking in such terms. It wasn't the kind of thing that his work or his inclinations led him into very often. Sariena talked with Vicki about similar things, and how Kronia's scientists saw the universe as an organism designed for a purpose—a view totally at odds with the belief system that Keene had grown up hearing. Now here was Foy, promoting it as the world view of a future star-going civilization. Not that long ago, Keene would have politely respected such sentiments but would have remained unaffected by them. They weren't relevant to what had been his world then—the world of the mathematically and physically accessible, made up of tangible entities. But now, maybe because of the change that had taken place in his vantage point and his situation, as he listened he found himself strangely stirred. Something deep inside was already glimpsing the vision of a race that would one day be, their ships casting off across voids to other worlds and other suns to find their God. Human technology functioning as the essential partner of life, not stifling and replacing life as it had on Earth. It could only have come about in the conditions that reigned on Kronia, where life and technology were mutually interdependent, and neither could exist without the other.
Foy had moved to stand with his back to the window and was watching Keene, letting him form his own conclusions in his own time. Keene stared at the image of Earth again, and then back at the white-haired figure in the silver-gray robe, looking like a prophet of old or the abbot of some remote and fabled Tibetan temple. Vorse didn't contribute but was looking on in silent endorsement.
"That's what you really believe here?" Keene said. "What Kronia believes. There is a meaning to it all, that we—Mankind—can discover." What he was hearing was a repudiation of the whole doctrine of existence responsible for shaping the world he had known—the doctrine that the authorities whom that world had relied on to know had said was irrefutable and unquestionable. The immensity of the implications that it opened up for the future that was portended, and the significance of the roles that he, like everyone, stood to play in it, was dizzying.
"Or maybe rediscover," Foy said. "One of the things that we'd very much like to know more about is the culture that existed out here before, when Earth was a satellite of Saturn."
"You believe that maybe they knew more about things like that?" Keene said.
"We can only speculate. Virtually all of the physical evidence was lost, even before Athena. We only have the scraps of what they recorded, handed down in tradition and legend. But cultures all over the world told of a lost Golden Age, long ago, when Man lived in harmony with nature and the gods, strife was unknown, and the world was plentiful. And in all of those tales, Saturn was the god that ruled the skies."
Keene nodded. Sariena had talked about that too.
Foy went on, "We think Saturn was a benign proto-sun then, pouring out sustenance to give Earth a richness and diversity of life that was never seen or imagined since. But that era was ended by cataclysm in a way we're still not sure of, and Earth was torn away to enter the fiery domain of the Sun. Its forests and gardens were turned into deserts, its animals died in graveyards by the millions. And for the humans who remained, violence and ruthlessness became the code for survival. It became the only way that Man knew, and all the cultures that reemerged subsequently were rooted in it. Eventually they were unable to conceive how things could be otherwise."
Foy paused again, but Keene was still struggling with visions that would probably take him days to come to terms with. Finally, Vorse spoke, turning toward Keene as if he had been waiting for the lead up to this moment. "But, as Jon indicated at the beginning, the difference this time is that Kronia exists. We can prevent the same pattern from repeating again. So I can tell you now, Lan, that it has been decided to go back as soon as possible. The earlier we intervene, the better."
As the meaning of Vorse's words sank in, Keene's gaze shifted to Foy, as if for confirmation. "Back to Earth?" Keene said. Foy nodded.
Vorse resumed, "It will soon be common knowledge. Preparations are being commenced. And this is where you come into it, Lan. One of the first needs will be a building program to replace the ships that were lost in the early rescue attempts. But not just with any ships. It needs the right kind of long-range, extended-mission-support ship. And when we get there, we'll be setting up a full range of seed industries using profab." Vorse was referring to "programmed fabrication," a manufacturing technology based on creating objects by building them up from successive deposition layers, controllable to the molecular scale and capable of producing just about anything, given the right raw materials. "Your combined propulsion and MHD power generation system that would provide full support capability immediately is perfect—just what we want."
Keene made an open-handed gesture. "Well, of course it's yours. And whatever more I can do to help . . ." He checked himself as the broader possibility struck him as to why they might have brought him here. "Are you saying you might want me to leave the AG project, to move into this program?"
"More than that," Vorse told him. "Maintaining bases that can operate viably on Earth will be crucial—both for remote outposts in the kind of venture Jon has described, or as centers to escape to if things go wrong out here. Either way, it's a new design and an untried concept. With what's at stake, it would be too risky to entrust operating them to anyone with secondhand knowledge. We want you there, as part of the first mission. We want you to go back to Earth."
Keene slumped back in his chair, too surprised to respond at once.
Foy smiled, as if acknowledging a joke that they had been keeping till the end. "It's ironic, don't you think, Dr. Keene, that because of this calamity that has happened, the new era that might take us back to where the Golden Age was leading will begin once again out here, at Saturn? And, answering your earlier question, that could be the ultimate meaning of everything that Kronia stands for."