When she opened her eyes, the varp noticed it and came back to life, rendering the display again. Generally it looked the same, but the Eye had moved a little bit, and the dot representing the flivver had covered most of the distance to the habitat ring. Zooming in, she could see the two habitats between which they were going to pass, and the much smaller rendering of the whip station between them, exercising its long hair-thin flagellum in preparation for their arrival. She must have slept for something like ten hours. Moirans were notorious for it. Remembering the looks she had exchanged earlier with Beled, she felt, then stifled, mild embarrassment over the fact that she had spent most of the journey snoring away.
She unstrapped and floated over to the zero-gee toilet at the end of the flivver’s cabin. When she emerged a few minutes later, she saw that Rhys was asleep, loosely strapped in before the control panel. Beled was still in his acceleration couch. He too had slipped on a varp, and she guessed from the way he was moving his hands and wiggling his fingers that he was working, as opposed to playing. He was probably filling out his Survey report. Which was what Kath Two ought to be doing.
They represented a civilization that had, during the Fourth Millennium, executed a plan to undo the damage caused by the Agent by identifying, cataloging, reaching, corralling, and revectoring millions of rocks in orbit around Earth, while also reaching as far as the Kuiper Belt to acquire chunks of frozen water and methane and ammonia and bring them home and smash them into the ruined planet. Essentially all of this work had been accomplished by robots. So much metal had gone into their construction that millions of humans now lived in space habitats whose steel hulls consisted entirely of melted down and reforged robot carcasses. It would have been easy for them to blanket the surface of New Earth with robots and, without ever sending down a single human being, perform a kind of survey: one that was heavy on data and light on judgment. In that version of the world, Kath Two and the others would have spent their lives in habitats, working at varps and mining data. All sorts of interesting philosophical arguments could have been framed as to whether that approach was better or worse than what they were in fact doing. But philosophy didn’t really enter into it. The decision to do it this way was driven partly by politics and partly by social mores.
On the political front it boiled down to the terms of Second Treaty, which, eighteen years ago, had terminated the second Red-Blue war, sometimes called the War in the Woods to distinguish it from the earlier War on the Rocks. The treaty imposed strict limitations on the number of robots that either side could send down to the surface. For that matter, it also limited the number of humans; but the upshot was that, given those limits, human surveyors could gather more useful information about conditions on New Earth than could robots beaming data up to the ring.
On the social front it was a question of Amistics, which was a term that had been coined ages ago by a Moiran anthropologist to talk about the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives. The word went all the way back to the Amish people of pre-Zero America, who had chosen to use certain modern technologies, such as roller skates, but not others, such as internal combustion engines. All cultures did this, frequently without being consciously aware that they had made collective choices.
To the extent that Blue had a definable culture, it tended to view technological aids with some ambivalence, a state of mind boiled down into the aphorism “Each enhancement is an amputation.” This was not so much a definable idea or philosophy as it was a prejudice, operant at a nearly subliminal level. It was traceable to certain parts of the Epic. In many of these, Tavistock Prowse played a role; he was seen as its literal embodiment in the sense that he had actually undergone a series of amputations, and been consumed as food, after throwing in his lot with the Swarm. Blue saw itself—according to cultural critics, defined itself—as the inheritors of the traditions of Endurance. By process of elimination, then, Red was the culture of the Swarm. A century and a half ago, Red had sealed itself off behind barriers both physical and cryptographic, so not much was known of its culture, but plenty of circumstantial evidence suggested that it had different Amistics from Blue. Specifically, the Reds were enthusiastic about personal technological enhancement.
The upshot, here in the cabin of this flivver, was that the missions just concluded by Kath Two, Beled, and Rhys had no value—in effect, they had never happened—until reports had been filed. And the reports could not simply consist of data dumps and pictures. Surveyors had to write actual prose. And the more judgment and insight were condensed into that prose, the more highly it was thought of by people like Doc and, increasingly, his senior students.
Knowing that, Kath Two had been writing her report since before her glider had touched down on a broad swath of grass a fortnight ago. What remained was some editing and a summary. This ought to have come easily. But half an hour after she pulled the document up on her varp, she found herself gazing at it, unable to focus.
“Beled,” she finally said. Distinctly enough for him to hear it, not loud enough to wake up Rhys.