Free Macrolife by George; Zebrowski Page A

he would go into physics. Sam sensed that still newer concerns were developing in Richard, and that Orton was somehow involved.
    After the meal was finished, Orton took out a cigar, prepared it with a small century-old penknife, lit it with a gold lighter, and took a few puffs.
    â€œIt took thousands of dollars to make this great bulk of mine,” he said as he sat back, “which supports a dreaming brain. So I’ll dream as well as I possibly can.” The chair creaked as he leaned back. “Of course, any reality made from a dream will sober up a bit….”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” Sam asked.
    â€œLet him tell it his way,” Richard said.
    Sam watched the cloud of blue smoke forming around Orton, making him look like a demon sitting in mists. “I don’t think that planets are the best places for a civilization. They’re not necessarily the best we can do at all.”
    â€œYou suggest that we all pack up and leave?” Sam said.
    â€œNot at all. I want to sketch a long-term development leading to another way of life, one that will institutionalize the pursuit of ambitious goals for humankind. Part of human life is the need to reassure ourselves about the future that we may never live to see, rather than fool ourselves, as many did in the last century, that there won’t be any future and they might as well lie down and die.” The waiter stopped by the table and Orton told him to bring a small bottle of brandy.
    â€œThe earth is a biological crib,” Blackfriar continued, “rocked back and forth by the sun—but we’ve got to grow up, start walking around, or rot. What I want to tell you about is a new kind of human society, one that may become a permanent form of culture.” He was puffing heavily on his cigar. “Picture this: a mobile space colony, supporting more than a million people. No, not a colony, but an organism which can move and grow as long as it can obtain resources and maintain a food supply within its ecology. It’s a living organism because it can respond to stimuli through its optical and sensory nervous system. It thinks with the intellects of its human and cybernetic intelligences. And it can reproduce, which is what we expect from a living organism. Its reproduction would be asexual, in part. The mobile world would undergo mitosis, the result of construction by human-directed machines of a complete new mobile container, and duplication of the human, animal, and plant cells by the usual means. If, for example, fifty years is the period for doubling the life of the mobile, then a new vehicle would be built during that time.”
    â€œThe new social container,” Richard said, “could be built as an outer shell, only slightly larger than the original, and when completed it would be removed from around the original and its interior work finished. Or the original could expand in size, shell after shell, to the limit of practicality. I suppose it could grow to be as large as a planet.”
    â€œBut we’re already out in sunspace,” Sam said, “and developing it quite well, as far as I see. Asterome is pretty much the kind of colony you describe.”
    Orton flicked a long ash into his ashtray and leaned back, creaking the chair dangerously. “That’s not the kind of thoroughgoing development I’m talking about, just as travel within the solar system is not real space travel. Interstellar travel is real space travel. The solar system is our backyard, our Wild West. I’m talking about using the resources of sunspace to create a new kind of social system, free of planets, free of the accidents of nature.”
    â€œThe asteroid hollow of Asterome has a completely controlled environment,” Sam said.
    â€œIt’s only a start,” Richard said. “The organism we’re talking about would be a continuation of biosocial evolution on a large scale. It would possess the