Free A World Between by Norman Spinrad

periods of boredom and waiting.
    Partially as a result of this instant access to Deep Sleep, where both body metabolism and memory track could be frozen into a timeless moment while objective years or even centuries flowed by unnoticed, the residential decks of the Arkology were for the most part starkly functional. Circles of spacious apartments surrounded the central drop and lift tubes with only a token formal garden here and there. Color schemes varied, but generally ran to bright primaries, golds, whites, and metallics—colors well calculated to energize the mind and brighten the spirit, but equally well calculated to avoid the earth-tones that would psychologically simulate growing things or the surfaces of planets. Even the paintings in the apartments, the murals in the public areas of the Arkology, and the motifs of the artificial “skies” above each deck tended almost entirely to the astronomical—star fields, great banded gas giants, complex multiple-star systems, stylized black holes, blazing novas. Growing things were for the most part confined to the hydroponic decks, where the vats were arranged in neat rows and the plants provided food, animal fodder, and oxygen; fuel for the human metabolism, not a narcotic for the soul.
    The psychic heart of an Arkology consisted of the lab decks and the computer deck and the communications deck that linked all planetbound Institutes of Transcendental Science and all Arkologies into a unified culture that could truly be said to be galactic, at least in a primitive sense. Homo galacticus had at least evolved to the point where he needed no psychological simulacrums of his planetary past any more than planetbound humans needed to live in simulations of the treetop world from which their remote ancestors had descended.
    And now we are poised for the next step, Falkenstein thought as he reached 2-deck. And fate has chosen me as the nexus of evolutionary forces, as the instantaneous instrument of the process which has taken our species from the trees to the stars, and which is now battering against the very limits of the naturally evolved universe. Now we must evolve beyond evolution itself or sink inexorably backward into the primordial slime.
    The main briefing room was a circular domed chamber; a round white table filled the center of the room, the floor was carpeted in light gray, and the walls were a seamless expanse of pale blue broken only by a large computer display screen and a speaker grid. Computer access was strictly voice-activated here, so that the Ark-mind could take part as just another collegue.
    The domed ceiling was a single great screen that could be opaqued to a soothing pearl gray or illumined with an appropriate abstraction from the artbanks, or, as it was now, turned into a “window” onto the space outside the Arkology’s inertia screen.
    Now the great globe of Pacifica hung above the table, a cloud-swirled ball of greens, browns, and brilliant blue suspended in the perpetual blackness of star-filled space. White icecaps gleamed at either pole. The great curving horn of the main continent of Columbia half-cradled the vast Island Continent as if it had just flung an armful of green jewels eastward across the azure sea. The Big Blue River and its tributaries were clearly visible .like a network of blue veins draining the green and gold eastern plains. The Sierra Cordillera cleanly divided the western portion of Columbia, furred with green on the western slopes, outlining the sere brown of the desert interior. At this magnification, even the city of Gotham winked at the edge of visibility at the delta-mouth of the Big Blue, like a tiny chip of shiny metal intermittently catching the light of the sun. The immense ball above utterly dominated the room. It was a tangibly living planet, huge, verdant, and, with its perpetual slow swirl and ebb of white cloud patterns, organic and breathing, palpably alive.
    Five men and a woman sat around the white table.