“It’s a kind of scholarship program,” she said. Her name was Joyce. “We’re all apprentices who joined Praxis last year, and we were selected to come here for classes.”
“Were you by chance working on full-world economics today?”
“No, volleyball.”
Art went back outside, wishing he had gotten selected to their program rather than his. He wondered if there was some big hot-tub facility, down there overlooking the ocean. It did not seem impossible; the ocean here was cool, and if everything was economics, it could be seen as an investment. Maintaining the human infrastructure, so to speak.
Back in the residence, his fellow guests were talking the day over. “I hate this kind of stuff,” said Sam.
“We’re stuck with it,” Max said gloomily. “It’s join a cult or lose your job.”
The others were not so pessimistic. “Maybe he’s just lonely,” Amy suggested.
Sam and Max rolled their eyes and glanced toward the kitchen.
“Maybe he always wanted to be a teacher,” Sally said.
“Maybe he wants to keep Praxis growing ten percent per year,” George said, “full world or not.”
Sam and Max nodded at this, and Elizabeth looked annoyed. “Maybe he wants to save the world!” she said.
“Right,” Sam said, and Max and George snickered.
“Maybe he’s got this room bugged,” Art said, which cut short the conversation like a guillotine.
The days that followed were much like the first one. They sat in the conference room, and Fort circled them and talked through the mornings, sometimes coherently, sometimes not. One morning he spent three hours talking about feudalism—how it was the clearest political expression of primate dominance dynamics, how it had never really gone away, how transnational capitalism was feudalism writ large, how the aristocracy of the world had to figure out how to subsume capitalist growth within the steady-state stability of the feudal model. Another morning he talked about a caloric theory of value called eco-economics, apparently first worked out by early settlers on Mars; Sam and Max rolled their eyes at that news, while Fort droned on about Taneev and Tokareva equations, scribbling illegibly on a drawing board in the corner.
But this pattern didn’t last, because a few days after their arrival a big swell came in from the south, and Fort canceled their meetings and spent all his time surfing or skimming over the waves in a birdsuit, which was a light broad-winged bodysuit, a flexible fly-by-wire hang glider that translated the flyer’s muscle movements into the proper semi-rigid configurations for successful flight. Most of the young scholarship winners joined him in the air, swooping around like Icaruses, and then dropping in and planing swiftly over the cushions of air pushed up by every breaking wave, air surfing just like the pelicans that had invented the sport.
Art went out and thrashed around on a body board, enjoying the water, which was chill, but not so much as to absolutely require a wetsuit. He hung out near the break that Joyce surfed, and chatted with her between sets, and found out that the other ancient kitchen workers were good friends of Fort’s, veterans of the first years of Praxis’s rise to prominence. The young scholars referred to them as the Eighteen Immortals. Some of the Eighteen were based at the camp, while others dropped by for a kind of ongoing reunion, conferring about problems, advising the current Praxis leadership on policy, running seminars and classes, and playing in the waves. Those who didn’t care for the water worked in the gardens.
Art inspected the gardeners closely as he hiked back up to the compound. They worked in something resembling slow motion, talking to each other all the while. Currently the main task appeared to be harvesting the tortured apple bushes.
The south swell subsided, and Fort reconvened Art’s group. One day the topic was Full-World Business Opportunities, and Art began to see why he and his six fellows might have been chosen to attend: Amy and George worked in contraception, Sam and Max in industrial design, Sally and Elizabeth in agricultural technology, and he himself in resource recovery. They all worked in full-world businesses already, and in the afternoon’s games they proved fairly good at designing new ones.
Another day Fort proposed a game in which they solved the full-world problem by returning to an empty world. They were to suppose the release of a plague vector that would kill everyone in the world who had not had the gerontological treatment. What would the pros and cons of such an action be?
The group stared at their lecterns, nonplussed. Elizabeth declared that she wouldn’t play a game based on such a monstrous idea.
“It is a monstrous idea,” Fort agreed. “But that doesn’t make it impossible. I hear things, you see. Conversations at certain levels. Among the leadership of the big transnationals, for instance, there are discussions. Arguments. You hear all kinds of ideas put out quite seriously, including some like this one. Everyone deplores them, and the subject changes. But no one claims that they are technically impossible. And some seem to think that they would solve certain problems that otherwise are unsolvable.”
The group considered this thought unhappily. Art suggested that agricultural workers would be in short supply.
Fort was looking out at the ocean. “That’s the fundamental problem with a collapse,” he said thoughtfully. “Once you start one, it’s hard to pick a point at which one can confidently say it will stop. Let’s go on.”
And they did, rather subdued. They played Population Reduction, and given the alternative they had just contemplated, went at it with a certain intensity. Each of them took a turn being Emperor of the World, as Fort put it, and outlined his or her plan in some detail.
When it was Art’s turn, he said, “I would give everyone alive a birthright which entitled them to parent three-quarters of a child.”
Everyone laughed, including Fort. But Art persevered. He explained that every pair of parents would thus have the right to bear a child and a half; after having one, they could either sell the right to the other half, or arrange to buy a half from some other couple and go on to have a second child. Prices for half children would fluctuate in classic supply/demand fashion. Social consequences would be positive; people who wanted extra children would have to sacrifice for them, and those who didn’t would have a source of income to help support the one they had. When populations dropped far enough, the World Emperor might consider changing the birthright to one child per person, which would be close to a demographic steady state; but given the longevity treatment, the three-quarters limit might have to be in effect for a long time.
When Art was done outlining the proposal he looked up from the notes on his lectern. Everyone was staring at him.
“Three quarters of a child,” Fort repeated with a grin, and everyone laughed again. “I like that.” The laughter stopped. “It would finally establish a monetary value for a human life, on the open market. So far the work done in that area has been sloppy at best. Lifetime incomes and expenditures and the like.” He sighed and shook his head. “The truth is, economists cook most of the numbers in the back room. Value isn’t really an economic calculation. No, I like this. Let’s see if we can estimate how much the price of a half child would be. I’m sure there would be speculation, middlemen, a whole market apparatus.”
So they played the three-quarters game for the rest of the afternoon, getting right down to the commodities market and the plots for soap operas. When they finished, Fort invited them to a barbecue on the beach.
They went back to their rooms and put on windbreakers, and hiked down the valley path into the glare of the sunset. On the beach under a dune was a big bonfire, being tended by some of the young scholars. As they approached and sat on blankets around the fire, a dozen or so of the Eighteen Immortals landed out of the air, running across the sand and bringing their wings slowly down, then unzipping from their suits, and pulling wet hair out of their eyes, and talking among themselves about the wind. They helped each other out of the long wings, and stood in their bathing suits goose-pimpled a
nd shivering: centenarian flyers with wiry arms outstretched to the fire, the women just as muscular as the men, their faces just as lined by a million years of squinting into the sun and laughing around the fire. Art watched the way Fort joked with his old friends, the easy way they toweled each other down. Secret lives of the rich and famous! They ate hot dogs and drank beer. The flyers went behind a dune and returned dressed in pants and sweatshirts, happy to stand by the fire a bit longer, combing out each other’s wet hair. It was a dusky twilight, and the evening onshore breeze was salty and cold. The big mass of orange flame danced in the wind, and light and shadow flickered over Fort’s simian visage. As Sam had said earlier, he didn’t look a day over eighty.
Now he sat among his seven guests, who were sticking together, and stared into the coals and started talking again. The people on the other side of the fire continued in their conversations, but Fort’s guests leaned closer to hear him over the wind and waves and crackling wood, looking a bit lost without their lecterns in their laps.
“You can’t make people do things,” Fort said. “It’s a matter of changing ourselves. Then people can see, and choose. In ecology they have what they call the founder principle. An island population is started by a, small number of settlers, so it has only a small fraction of the genes of the parent population. That’s the first step toward speciation. Now I think we need a new species, economically speaking of course. And Praxis itself is the island. The way we structure it is a kind of engineering of the genes we came to it with. We have no obligation to abide by the rules as they stand now. We can make a new species. Not feudal. We’ve got the collective ownership and decision-making, the policy of constructive action. We’re working toward a corporate state similar to the civic state they’ve made in Bologna. That’s a kind of democratic communist island, outperforming the capitalism around it, and constructing a better way to live. Do you think that kind of democracy is possible? We’ll have to try playing at that one of these afternoons.”
“Whatever you say,” Sam remarked, which got him a sharp glance from Fort.
The following morning it was sunny and warm, and Fort decided the weather was too good to stay indoors. So they returned to the beach and set up under a big awning near the firepit, among coolers and hammocks strung between the awning poles. The ocean was a deep bright blue, the waves small but crisp, and often occupied by wetsuited surfers. Fort sat in one of the hammocks and lectured on selfishness and altruism, taking his examples from economics, sociobiology, and bioethics. He concluded that strictly speaking, there was no such thing as altruism. It was only selfishness taking the long view, acknowledging the real costs of behavior and making sure to pay them in order not to run up any long-term debts. A very sound economic practice, in fact, if properly directed and applied. As he tried to prove by means of the selfish-altruism games they then played, like Prisoner’s Dilemma, or Tragedy of the Commons.
The next day they met in the surf camp again, and after a meandering talk on voluntary simplicity, they played a game Fort called Marcus Aurelius. Art enjoyed this game as he did all the others, and he played it well. But each day his lectern notes were getting shorter; for this day they read, in their entirety, Consumption—appetite—artificial needs—real needs—real costs—straw beds! Env. Impact = population X appetite X efficiency—in tropics refrigerators not a luxury—community refrigerators—cold houses—Sir Thomas More.
That evening the conferees ate alone, and their discussion over dinner was tired. “I suppose this place is a kind of voluntary simplicity,” Art remarked.
“Would that include the young scholars?” Max asked.
“I don’t see the Immortals doing very much with them.”
“They just like to look,” Sam said. “When you’re that old . . .”
“I wonder how long he plans to keep us here,” Max said. “We’ve only been here a week and it’s already boring.”
“I kind of like it,” Elizabeth said. “It’s relaxing.”
Art found that he agreed with her. He was getting up early; one of the scholars marked every dawn by striking a wooden block with a big wooden mallet, in a descending interval that drew Art out of sleep every time: tock. . . . . . . tock.…. tock. . . . tock . . . tock . . tock, tock tock toe-toe-toc-toc-to-to-to-t-t-ttttttt. After that Art went out into gray wet mornings, full of birdcalls. The sound of the waves was always there, as if invisible shells were held to his ears. When he walked the trail through the farm he always found some of the Eighteen Immortals around, chatting as they worked with hoes or pruning shears, or sat under the big oak tree looking out at the ocean. Fort was often among them. Art could hike through the hour before breakfast with the knowledge that he would spend the rest of the day in a warm room or on a warm beach, talking and playing games. Was that simple? He wasn’t sure. It was definitely relaxing; he had never spent time like it.
But of course there was more to it than that. It was, as Sam and Max kept reminding them, a kind of test. They were being judged. The old man was watching them, and maybe the Eighteen Immortals as well, and the young scholars too, the “apprentices” who began to look to Art like serious powers, young hotshots who ran a lot of the day-to-day operations of the compound, and perhaps of Praxis too, even at its highest levels—in consultation with the Eighteen, or perhaps not. After listening to Fort ramble, he could see how one might be inclined to bypass him when it came to practical matters. And the conversations around the dishwasher sometimes had the tone of siblings squabbling over how to deal with incapacitated parents. . . .
Anyway, a test: one night Art went over to the kitchen to get a glass of milk before bed, and passed a small room off the dining hall, where a number of people, old and young, were watching a videotape of the morning’s session with Fort. Art went back to his room, deep in thought.
The next morning in the conference room Fort circled the room in his usual way. “The new opportunities for growth are no longer in growth.”
Sam and Max glanced at each other ever so briefly.
“That’s what all this full-world thinking comes down to. So we’ve got to identify the new nongrowth growth markets, and get into them. Now recall that natural capital can be divided into marketable and nonmarketable. Nonmarketable natural capital is the substrate from which all marketable capital arises. Given its scarcity and the benefits that it provides, it would make sense according to standard supply/demand theory to set its price as infinite. I’m interested in anything that has a theoretically infinite price. It’s an obvious investment. Essentially it’s infrastructure investment, but at the most basic biophysical level. Infra-infrastructure, so to speak, or bioinfrastructure. And that’s what I want Praxis to start doing. We obtain and rebuild whatever bioinfrastructure has been depleted by liquidation. It’s long-term investment, but the yields will be fantastic.”
“Isn’t most bioinfrastructure publicly owned?” Art asked.
“Yes. Which means close cooperation with the governments involved. Praxis’s gross annual product is much larger than most countries’. What we need to do is find countries with small GNPs and bad CFIs.”
“CFI?” Art said.
“Country Future Index. It’s an alternative to the GNP measure-merit, taking into account debt, political stability, environmental health and the like. A useful cross-check on the GNP, and it helps tag countries that could use our help. We identify those, go to them and offer them a massive capital investment, plus political advice, security, whatever they need. In return we take custody of their bioinfrastructure. We also have access to their labor. It’s an obvious partnership. I think it will be the coming thing.”
“How do we fit in?” Sam asked, gesturing at the group.
Fort looked at them one by one. “I’m going to give each of you a different assignment. I’ll want you to keep them confidential. You’ll be leaving here separately in any case, and going different places. You’ll all be doing diplomatic work as a Praxis liaison, as well as specific jobs inv
olved with bioinfrastructure investment. I’ll give you the details in private. Now let’s take an early lunch, and afterward I'll meet with you one at a time.”
Diplomatic work! Art wrote in his lectern.
He spent the afternoon wandering around the gardens, looking at the espaliered apple bushes. Apparently he was not early in the list of personal appointments with Fort. He shrugged at that. It was a cloudy day, and the flowers in the garden were wet and vibrant. It would be tough to move back to his studio under the freeway in San Jose. He wondered what Sharon was doing, whether she ever thought of him. Sailing with her vice-chairman, no doubt.
It was nearly sunset, and he was about to go back to his room and get ready for dinner when Fort appeared on the central path. “Ah, there you are,” he said. “Let’s go down to the oak.”
They sat by the big tree’s trunk. The sun was cutting under the low clouds, and everything was turning the color of the roses. “You live in a beautiful place,” Art said.
Fort didn’t appear to hear him. He was looking up at the underlit clouds billowing overhead.
After a few minutes of this contemplation he said, “We want you to acquire Mars.”
“Acquire Mars,” Art repeated.
“Yes. In the sense that I spoke about this morning. These national-transnational partnerships are the coming thing, there’s no doubt about it. The old flag-of-convenience relationships were suggestive, but they need to be taken further, so that we have more control over our investment. We did that with Sri Lanka, and we’ve had so much success in our deal there that the other big transnats are all imitating us, actively recruiting countries in trouble.”
“But Mars isn’t a country.”