Twelve Tomorrows 2014, page 23
"My own mother's been that way for 80 years. My dad was twice as smart as I am. Did he ever change her mind about anything that mattered? Not a bit of it."
"I've never yet met your mother." said Liam thoughtfully. "I did meet Genevi è ve's parents. They came through Seattle on one of their world tours."
"So? What did you make of'em?"
"Families are complicated, aren't they? They're like miniature civilizations."
"That's right, they're wicked." said Kurt. "That father of hers was a career French politician. He's crooked, he's corrupt, he's more sly and cynical than Cardinal Richelieu. But you know, to do him credit, there's something very broad-minded and forgiving about him. People who are civilized and also amoral, well, they don't make big, harsh demands. They're willing to let you be. I always got along pretty well with my father-in-law. I should go to see him, actually. I should apologize for what I've become."
"He didn't seem to mind much about the post-human business." said Liam. "He said that he was old, and he'd seen a lot of neat hacks."
In the city of Cold Lake, Charlotte had, somehow, found a house for them. Charlotte had always been eager to arrange her parents'lives.
"If Charlotte likes it." Kurt told his wife. "there's bound to be something badly wrong with it."
"Of course I know that, darling." said Genevi è ve within the taxi. "but I promised her we would take a look. Really, Kurt, anything is better than another hour in that woman's presence. I love her - but motherhood, good God, Kurt, it's one long, endless emotional disaster."
"Maybe we should give up about our house-hunting. Maybe we should just walk the Universe."
"Kurt, you promised. ‘ A good safe place, where I take care of you, and you take care of me.'"
She was quoting him. He had indeed promised that. "Well." he said at last. "at least she's snagged a nice boyfriend. He's well-educated, he's rich. What is wrong with that kid? I pity him."
"Well, Charlotte has always been pretty … Charlotte does have a certain … propulsive quality. Maybe some men need a woman who will … wake them up every morning and push them hard to do nonsense. Kurt, are we terrible to talk like this? I'm her mother - I used to be so blind to Charlotte's faults! Now they're so obvious to me. Her human personality is so limited. She's like a clockwork toy."
"‘ To know all is to forgive all,'" Kurt quoted." It's pretty hard to forgive humanity, though, isn't it? One has to forgive Chernobyl, Fukushima, and all those fossil fuels."
"I could forgive all of those faults." said Genevi è ve. "if there was enough distance."
"What, like the tremendous distance of a million years, maybe." said Kurt. "Hmm. Well, even radioactive half-life has some expiration date."
"I wouldn't mind dear Charlotte one bit if … well, if we were just living on some other planet. Is there any way we can manage that?"
"Well, no, to tell the truth." said Kurt. "Because space work is all about drones and robots. You can't put human flesh up there, with all that radiation and no gravity. It makes no engineering sense."
"That is such a pity." said Genevi è ve tenderly, taking his hand. "With you, I could live on the moon, so easily." She leaned her head against the taxi glass and stared through the orange dusk. "Look at the moon rising there. It's always so beautiful. Another world, and mankind scarcely touched it. Just a few little flags here and there."
"Baby, honey, listen to me: the moon has no air and no water. The lunar day lasts for weeks, and the grit on the moon is so rough that it wrecks machinery. Oh, hell, baby, don't let me destroy your sweet mood here. Of course you can have the moon! I'll scrape up a lunar house with my own bare hands."
Cold Lake stood above a reservoir of fossil fuel shale. Victimized by an evil influx of oil wealth, the local landscape was pockmarked with giant sacrifice zones. The fracking had grown frantic in the desperation of the Second Austerity. The lithosphere below human feet had been polluted even more thoroughly than the atmosphere above human heads.
Minor earthquakes ceaselessly troubled the fractured areas, in the stony equivalent of the destabilized skies. The terrain above the subterranean blasted zones had become an Anthropocen. "involuntary park." Much like Chernobyl and Fukushima, these dehumanized zones were some of the greenest, prettiest areas in the world.
With geolocative precision, the drone taxi pulled up at a gate through a long wall of rusty chain-link. Kurt and Genevi è ve were greeted by the installation caretaker. He was a melancholy Russian named Exter. Exter had been waiting for them in a battered golf cart, along with a pet terrier and a samovar.
"I have to apologize for the state of the mansion." said Exter, handing over two shots of hot black tea. "There's been no budget here for maintenance. We have to keep the mansion in its state of lowest entropy. We only run it when we purge excess power from the fusion plant."
Kurt gazed over the stony, tumbledown wreck that Exter had described as . "mansion." It appeared to be a large junkyard for small concrete blocks. These construction modules had the size, shape, and gleam of ivory dice. Endless truckloads of them had been dumped across the fracked, unsteady landscape, in rolling hills and mounds. Many mounds were overgrown with Canadian hemp plants - damp, leafy masses taller than Kurt's head.
"Is that the fusion plant." said Genevi è ve, pointing at an overlit containment dome.
"I know it doesn't look like much." Exter grumbled. "Science always promised free, clean fusion energy to mankind - but it was always one decade away, one decade away! Now we have it. It just sits there. Too cheap to meter!"
"At least it's up and running." said Kurt. He scratched the furry head of the caretaker's well-behaved dog.
"The plant does political work." said Exter. "It sucks carbon out of the sky and pumps it back down in the fracking zone. So there's just no end to the tremors here. I hope you good people don't mind those."
Kurt bent and plucked up a handful of the construction cubes. They were printed from cheap, common sea salt, with a slick plastic coat on all six of their faces. "So, were these little bricks all parts of one big structure, once? Those earthquakes must be pretty severe."
"You don't know the history of this development." said Exter.
"Barely." said Genevi è ve. "We just arrived in town. Does the fusion plant leak radiation over the property?"
"Everyone who comes here asks me that." said Exter. "Of course a nuclear plant leaks. They always do. But that's not the sad story … You know, I've been involved in this place for so long that I don't know how to begin."
"Oh, feel free to tell us anything." Genevi è ve coaxed. "We're very understanding, I promise."
"Maybe it will help if I just perform the basic demo for you." said Exter. He reached into his golf cart and snagged up a visored construction helmet. He tugged it on, and then stretched out his right hand.
The white dice suddenly clicked together in Kurt's startled grip. Writhing like living things, the joined blocks hopped from his fingers.
The terrier ran off, barking frantically. All over the junkyard, the blocks were stirring within their inert heaps. They woke and stirred in jittery little landslides. They clicked and snapped together with a steadily growing urgency.
A jagged dune rolled across the landscape, and a flat foundation formed in its wake. Then came a tumbling uprush of walls, buttresses, and joists. It was a dry, noisy, clattering process, with a juicy electrical hum and the vague smell of ozone.
A structure arose, in surging waves of pixelated sugar cubes. A moon-colored ivory fortress, a blast-proofed and airtight redoubt, a thing of algebraic fins and pixelated ribbing. It had soaring aerial walkways leading no place in particular, and spiky fractal towers that radiated a pure enthusiasm for recursive subroutines. The mansion looked entirely fit for another world.
Genevi è ve clasped her hands before her throat in adoration, and then snapped her fingers. "Well, this is the place."
"Baby." said Kurt. "This isn't some small, private cottage fit for us philosophers. This mansion could sleep 50 people."
"We'll have parties." Genevi è ve said. "We'll entertain."
Kurt turned to Exter. "Okay, the wife loves it. So let's talk maintenance costs."
"Well, sir, there you've hit on an obvious problem." said Exter respectfully. "You see, this is one of those digitized, ‘ bits for atoms'structures, and …"
"I get that. What holds the units together? Van der Waals forces?"
"Yes, sir. That, and some simple plastic adhesion. But that means you have to resurface the cubes periodically, and ." Exter tapped the top of his construction helmet. A laser beam flew from his sleeve. "You see these incomplete areas? That digital decay? It looks like broken brickwork. Those are the dead voxels in the heaps. They're like dead pixels on a screen, and …"
"That gives it character." said Genevi è ve decisively. "It's a fixer-upper." She placed her finger to her tapered chin. "I'll have to move the walls around some, though. I don't like that buttress."
"Madame has hit on the software problem." said Exter.
"We knew there was a software issue." said Kurt. "I was about to ask."
"This is an extraterrestrial building." said Exter. "It was the prototype for a manned lunar colony. The concept was to send some drones up to compact the lunar soil. Then the smart bricks would auto-assemble into a lunar structure to house cosmonauts."
There was a silence of two dozen heartbeats.
"Why." said Kurt.
"Well, there was some talk of commercial lunar mining." said Exter, vaguely waving his free hand.
"What, cosmonauts using pickaxes? Mining is strictly robot work, everybody knows that! Even if you want to mine an extraterrestrial body, mining the moon makes no sense at all! Asteroid mining is a hundred times cheaper than mining the moon."
"Well, a few drones did mine the asteroids." said Exter. "Until they dropped that metals shipment off the coast of Chile."
"They're still a nation-state down in Chile, aren't they." said Kurt. "You'd think a people in their situation would be used to a few tsunamis."
"Personally, I agree with you, sir." said Exter. "But the big, glorious technical projects no longer suit the temper of our times. It's some general failure of the will of humanity, I suppose. We're a chastened people, here in the Anthropocene."
The sun was setting, and Exter raked the unstable structure with his pointer beam. "As you can see, I guard a faded moonbeam. It's old-fashioned, far out of our cultural style. A dream that failed. Then a dream that died."
"Oh, Kurt, we must have this." said Genevi è ve. "It's so us."
"Don't rush me, baby, we're getting there. Obviously, Exter, your so-called palace is in need of major repairs. So what's the main issue here? It's the software, isn't it?"
"The gentleman is right again." said Exter. "In a lunar colony, the major risk is a blowout. So it's necessary to dig for safety, deep into the lunar regolith. That's what was done in this prototype." Exter pointed with his beam. "So the brain of this structure, the mansion's command room, was excavated 40 meters down, along this vector."
"So what kind of shape is it in?"
"It flooded."
"What." said Kurt. "a rock-fracture problem? Drilling fluids?"
"No." said Exter. "worse than that. Human indifference. A hole in the ground is dark and ugly, like a coal mine. The owner never went down there, because he was such a busy man, and one day, we just realized that, well, nature had taken her toll."
"Sheer carelessness." said Kurt.
"It was just human error, sir. The biggest dreamers are the most human."
"So, who was this reckless owner of yours, this clown who flooded his own command post? One of those Silicon Valley one-percenters, with money stacked to the moon?"
"He wouldn't have called himself that, sir." said Exter, wounded. "He was a great philanthropist. He wanted the human race to survive on the moon. I loved that man. He was very persuasive."
"All right. Then I'm guessing it was running on proprietary software, too." Kurt said. "Something his own company built. Specifically for this project."
"Unfortunately, yes."
"Any backups, any software documentation?"
"That was all kept in the safest place." said Exter. "Inside the control room."
"Well, we'll just have to pump it out and have a look." said Kurt. "It's a good thing that I've handled projects of this kind before. Obviously, that's where all the real work and expense will be. This beautiful, shining, bits-for-atoms Moon Palace, it's just the fa ç ade for us eager buyers."
"I know that a dream house is trouble." said Genevi è ve. "But I saw it, and now I'm in love with it. I'll never be happy anywhere else."
"Baby, it's settled. It's all right. I'm liking this manhole bomb shelter. It's my house, too. My place in this house is all about the man cave. I need a good place to meditate in peace and get some garage work done. To tell the truth, I insist on that."
"Well, I'm so glad our house search is over." said Genevi è ve, knotting her hands and stretching. "What a relief! Now the real fun starts."
"I always loved it, too." said Exter, removing his helmet and wiping at his reddened eyes. "But I have to warn you good people: a dream that has failed is a hard place to dwell in. This is not a palace on the moon. It's a prototype, a mere demo. It's the alpha rollout! It can barely stand up for failing!"
"Oh, we hear you." said Kurt. "That's why, for us, it's so perfect."
"We don't care what mankind thinks is real." said Genevi è ve serenely. "We're content to live in the fiction. All the best people do."
At Home in the Cosmos
Peter Swirski
A Polish science fiction writer's monumental nonfiction meditation on human evolution, which became a textbook for a generation of Soviet scientists and engineers, has finally appeared in English after 50 years. His American translator and best-known scholar says it is a still-relevan. "futurological masterpiece."
BOOK REVIEW
Summa Technologiae (Electronic Mediations)
by Stanislaw Lem. Translated by Joanna Zylinska.
(Originally published in Polish in 1964 as Summa technologiae. )
University of Minnesota Press, March 2013; 448 pages; $19.05
"TO MY MIND, YOU CAN NEVER 100 percent dissociate the Cognitive dimension from the Artistic. For example, my Summa Technologiae … is better than my The Philosophy of Chance because it's better written." confided Stanislaw Lem to his American translator in a letter of October 19, 1974. Who was this Polish writer who would not divorce knowledge from literature, and why was he so proud of the hubristically titled Summa Technologiae ?
Known to generations of his readers as a science fiction master, to the cognoscenti Lem has been nothing less than a cultural phenomenon and a literary movement in himself - an indefatigable innovator and a neologist extraordinaire, capable of oscillating like a sinusoid betwee. "crazan." an. "ultranalytica." in the space of a single paragraph. His books have sold close to 40 million copies in more than 40 languages. During a career that stretched from the mid-1940s until his death in 2006, he was praised by litt é rateurs from Arthur Koestler to Anthony Burgess, literary critics from Leslie Fiedler to Susan Sontag, and tastemakers from the New Yorker to the Times Literary Supplement .
The New York Times Book Review called hi. "a modern European version of Swift or Voltair." ; and the London Times proposed that his novels ought to carry a label: THE READING OF THIS BOOK IS GOOD FOR YOU. One of the few touchstones of international acclaim that eluded him was the Nobel Prize. Still, the Philadelphia Inquirer - seconded by the New York Times Book Review - joked that if he was passed over, it would be only because someone told the judges that he wrote science fiction.
Yet if anything, these extravagant tributes to Lem's literary genius only serve to obscure his stature. A polymath, he was a well-regarded philosopher, sociologist, and diagnostician and prognostician of science. Futurists like Alvin Toffler (the author of Future Shock ), cosmologists like Carl Sagan, cognitive scientists like John McCarthy and Douglas Hofstadter, and philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Nicholas Rescher professed their deep regard for his art. Indeed, his short stor. "The Third Sally, or the Dragons of Probabilit." is a byword in many a department of physics and mathematics, while the book in which it features, The Cyberiad , even boasts an entry in a dictionary of mathematical quotations.
During his literary tours of the USSR, Lem was regularly asked by Nobel laureates and other members of the Soviet Academy of Science to deliver highly prized impromptu talks and seminars. In Germany, cross-disciplinary interest in his Gedankenexperimente even resulted in a unique symposium devoted to scientific discussions of the cyber-evolutionary prognoses from Summa Technologiae and its follow-up, Golem XIV . Fortified with computer analyses of Lem's metafictional lectures, supposedly delivered by a supercomputer of the 14t. "binasty." the 1981 sessions included linguists, biologists, sociologists, and even cognitive scientists.
Although Lem regarded Golem XIV as the pinnacle of his intellectual labors, much of it is necessarily dated today in the age of systems theory, control theory, information theory, prospect theory, complexity theory, and, not least, cutting-edge evolutionary theory. The same cannot be said, however, about Summa Technologiae , his earlier magnum opus on the subject of biological and technological evolution. First published in 1964 in a modest edition of 3,000 copies, it ended up playing the role of a futurological textbook for a whole generation of Soviet scientists and engineers, obstructed by the Iron Curtain from contacts with Western science.
Summa is an all-encompassing dissertation on evolution: not merely the evolution of life and consciousness but also of science, technology, culture, art, and the entire human species. In the author's words from the original introduction - replaced in the 1974 edition - Summa advances an evolutionary interpretatio. "of the past and future of man." " a picture of the Cosmos seen with the eyes of the Constructor." an. "a study of the engineering of the powers of Nature." Virtual reality, information breeding, cosmic expansion, and autoevolution are just a few of the keyholes through which Lem peeks on the technosocial destiny of our species.
