The Anguished Dawn

by James P. Hogan

  "Rebuilding it should go a lot faster this time," Keene said. "Kronia was never here before to direct things. We've got a repository of knowledge that won't have to be discovered all over again."

  Foy gave him a long, contemplative look before replying, as if evaluating if this were the moment to broach whatever he'd had in mind in bringing Keene here. Finally, he said, "What we're looking at, Dr. Keene, isn't just the prospect of rebuilding civilization. Because of a quirk in recent times that led to the coming together of some extraordinarily gifted people, the circumstances that we have here at Kronia are unique in the history of human existence. As a consequence, we have the chance to found a civilization unlike anything that has existed before—the kind of civilization that visionaries through the ages have imagined, but which have defied all attempts to turn into reality. Some have concluded that it must always be so: that the harsh rules of reality and human nature make them permanently impossible dreams. But we believe otherwise. We believe that the forced cooperation that has been vital to survival out here at Kronia has produced a workable system of human values that could never have happened in the violent, competitive conditions that governed the development of cultures on Earth. If we can import that system back to Earth, maybe we'll be able to shape a civilization fundamentally different from any that emerged there before, rooted in the same ethic of mutual need and the inherent value of everyone as a unique individual that guides us here." He shrugged. "And if there do turn out to be survivors there, perhaps we can steer their early development in the same direction, before they begin increasing in numbers and organizing themselves into the old, eternal patterns of power rivalries and conflict."

  "Who are 'we'?" Keene asked, picking up on Foy's use of the word. "Who decides these things?"

  "Those of us who try to consider where our longer-term destiny might lie, beyond just muddling through from one century to the next," Foy replied. "After the present crisis has faded to become just another detail on the cosmic backdrop. When a new race has emerged that isn't divided within itself because of the inherently hostile nature of all its human relationships. Each against all. Take as much as you can in return for as little as you can get away with. That was the underlying rule that drove everything of importance on Earth, was it not? 'Good business.' 'Astute politics.' How could a sentiment like that ever mold and hold together a civilization capable of moving out among the stars?"

  Keene took a moment to adjust to the new dimension that the conversation was taking on. What Foy was talking about now went far beyond just an experiment in organizing a complex, technological society on an alternative basis to the monetary incentive that most people on Earth had regarded as self-evidently unavoidable.

  Foy completed Keene's thought as if he had been expecting it. "Sometimes our system is described as having invented what amounts to a new form of currency: a trade in the recognition of competence. And in some way it turns out to be a very superior currency. It can't be counterfeited, or stolen, or hoarded—for how can you fake skill or knowledge that you don't possess, take away another person's once they have it, or give it to someone who hasn't earned it? So corruption of the kind that comes with the power to steal legally or to bribe is impossible. And so does enslaving another person to create wealth for your own benefit—for with our kind of wealth the only one who could become rich is the slave."

  Keene had heard the analogy before, but he let Foy carry through without interruption. For years, Earth's experts had insisted that Kronia would never last. When it not only lasted but grew and attracted more numbers, they said it was only through dependence on Earth, and they tried cutting the flow of material supplies to prove it. But the restrictions only served to make Kronia more self-reliant sooner.

  Foy went on, "But that was said by Terrans who could only think in terms of a model based on economics. Earth was fixated on economics. It had become the global religion, dominating every aspect of life." He waved a hand. "Providing for material needs is important, of course, like eating. But like eating, it merely provides a foundation to support higher things. Look at earlier cultures and their works. Earth had brought everything down to the level of the foundation. It ate compulsively, all the time, with no other purpose."

  "An entire Earth culture modeled after Kronia?" Keene said. It was plain enough that this was what Foy meant, but Keene needed a moment to reflect on it. It hadn't been long ago when Grasse and Valcroix were telling him that the Kronian system couldn't survive much more of even the colony's own growth.

  "Not just Earth. Beyond it," Foy replied. "I already said, a culture capable for the first time of reaching for the stars." He waited for a few seconds, then grinned at the expression on Keene's face. "The conditioning of a Terran upbringing still shows, Dr. Keene. Forget the dogmas you heard repeated all around you every day of your life back there. This is perhaps the only system that could hold up on such a scale." Foy made a palm-up gesture with one hand. "How far did Earth's space programs get on its shopkeeper economics after the military incentives went away? Some corporate exploitation of the Moon. A couple of pilot bases on Mars that never amounted to more than glorified field laboratories. No profit. No aims beyond continuing the safe accumulation of capital." He shrugged. "And in any case, profit is a poor substitute for a motivation that will fire the passions of a whole culture. I'm talking about what can only be called spiritual—the kind of drive that inspired Europe of the High Middle Ages to create its soaring cathedrals and spurred the spread of Islam from India to Spain. The spirit that expresses belief in something beyond individual existence, larger than the individual, that will endure long after the individual has gone and give meaning to the life that was dedicated to it."

  "You're making it sound like a new Kronian religion," Keene said.

  Foy glanced at Vorse and inclined his head in a way that said he didn't entirely disagree. "Something that plays the role that religion once did, anyway. A universal sense of purpose, a quest that will spur a new Renaissance. Except that this Renaissance will be driven by visions of reality, not myth. All religions founded on myth eventually collapse when the myth is exposed." He paused for a moment. "And what I see playing that role is something that I know is very important to you, Dr. Keene.

  "I'm tempted to say 'science,' but I don't mean the dead husk of true inquiry that the word had come to mean in Earth's institutionalized orthodoxies. I mean the free, creative process that functions within and as part of a universe that it recognizes as itself alive—not some soulless observer of a dead machine. What science should have been. The driving force that by now would already have carried us across the Solar System, instead of selling out to the power structure as the European Church did before it, and allowing itself to be conscripted to serve politics and commerce. I've talked to Sariena and Gallian. They know you. It was what you stood for through your whole life back there."

  Keene nodded distantly. Had the human race been spread out and expanding in the way that Foy described, instead of concentrated in one place, the effects of Athena would have been far less calamitous. As things were, only the lucky fact of Kronia's existence had stood between civilization being obliterated completely, and the future that Foy was painting now. "Is that to be the God of your new religion, then, Jon?" he asked. "Life?"

  "Life and love of every creative thing a human being stands for and is capable of achieving," Foy answered. "When Earth replaced the old gods of living nature with its mechanistic science, it reduced nature to inanimate matter running according to mechanical laws, within which life became a pointless accident, thought was no more than a byproduct of life, and morality an invention of wishful thinking. The gods that the new priesthood served were not knowledge or wisdom, but better technologies for accelerating the acquisition of material wealth through legalized theft and violence." Foy looked at Vorse briefly as if for confirmation and tossed out a palm again. "And why not? All other meaning and purpose had been stripped away. The only aspect of individual worth
that was recognized and rewarded was efficacy in contributing to profits. No wonder so many knew intuitively that their lives had the potential for better things, and rebelled. That was what drove the migration to Kronia."

  "So is that what you see as Kronia's purpose?" Keene asked. "To go out and become part of a living universe?"

  "Whatever is in its nature to become," Foy replied. "The High Cultures that have emerged through human history are themselves living organisms that appear, grow, flourish, and eventually die. Each possesses its own unique soul. In the course of its lifetime, everything that a culture produces—its arts; its religion; its mathematics, its sciences; its philosophy and world view, works and constructions—all are an expression of that soul. It can be no other way. Like any organism, it has no choice but to actualize the imperative that's inherent in its nature. Kronia will become what it is destined to become."

  "Becoming one with God?"

  "I suppose you could look at it that way."

  Keene was surprised to hear himself talking in such terms. It wasn't the kind of thing that his work or his inclinations led him into very often. Sariena talked with Vicki about similar things, and how Kronia's scientists saw the universe as an organism designed for a purpose—a view totally at odds with the belief system that Keene had grown up hearing. Now here was Foy, promoting it as the world view of a future star-going civilization. Not that long ago, Keene would have politely respected such sentiments but would have remained unaffected by them. They weren't relevant to what had been his world then—the world of the mathematically and physically accessible, made up of tangible entities. But now, maybe because of the change that had taken place in his vantage point and his situation, as he listened he found himself strangely stirred. Something deep inside was already glimpsing the vision of a race that would one day be, their ships casting off across voids to other worlds and other suns to find their God. Human technology functioning as the essential partner of life, not stifling and replacing life as it had on Earth. It could only have come about in the conditions that reigned on Kronia, where life and technology were mutually interdependent, and neither could exist without the other.

  Foy had moved to stand with his back to the window and was watching Keene, letting him form his own conclusions in his own time. Keene stared at the image of Earth again, and then back at the white-haired figure in the silver-gray robe, looking like a prophet of old or the abbot of some remote and fabled Tibetan temple. Vorse didn't contribute but was looking on in silent endorsement.

  "That's what you really believe here?" Keene said. "What Kronia believes. There is a meaning to it all, that we—Mankind—can discover." What he was hearing was a repudiation of the whole doctrine of existence responsible for shaping the world he had known—the doctrine that the authorities whom that world had relied on to know had said was irrefutable and unquestionable. The immensity of the implications that it opened up for the future that was portended, and the significance of the roles that he, like everyone, stood to play in it, was dizzying.

  "Or maybe rediscover," Foy said. "One of the things that we'd very much like to know more about is the culture that existed out here before, when Earth was a satellite of Saturn."

  "You believe that maybe they knew more about things like that?" Keene said.

  "We can only speculate. Virtually all of the physical evidence was lost, even before Athena. We only have the scraps of what they recorded, handed down in tradition and legend. But cultures all over the world told of a lost Golden Age, long ago, when Man lived in harmony with nature and the gods, strife was unknown, and the world was plentiful. And in all of those tales, Saturn was the god that ruled the skies."

  Keene nodded. Sariena had talked about that too.

  Foy went on, "We think Saturn was a benign proto-sun then, pouring out sustenance to give Earth a richness and diversity of life that was never seen or imagined since. But that era was ended by cataclysm in a way we're still not sure of, and Earth was torn away to enter the fiery domain of the Sun. Its forests and gardens were turned into deserts, its animals died in graveyards by the millions. And for the humans who remained, violence and ruthlessness became the code for survival. It became the only way that Man knew, and all the cultures that reemerged subsequently were rooted in it. Eventually they were unable to conceive how things could be otherwise."

  Foy paused again, but Keene was still struggling with visions that would probably take him days to come to terms with. Finally, Vorse spoke, turning toward Keene as if he had been waiting for the lead up to this moment. "But, as Jon indicated at the beginning, the difference this time is that Kronia exists. We can prevent the same pattern from repeating again. So I can tell you now, Lan, that it has been decided to go back as soon as possible. The earlier we intervene, the better."

  As the meaning of Vorse's words sank in, Keene's gaze shifted to Foy, as if for confirmation. "Back to Earth?" Keene said. Foy nodded.

  Vorse resumed, "It will soon be common knowledge. Preparations are being commenced. And this is where you come into it, Lan. One of the first needs will be a building program to replace the ships that were lost in the early rescue attempts. But not just with any ships. It needs the right kind of long-range, extended-mission-support ship. And when we get there, we'll be setting up a full range of seed industries using profab." Vorse was referring to "programmed fabrication," a manufacturing technology based on creating objects by building them up from successive deposition layers, controllable to the molecular scale and capable of producing just about anything, given the right raw materials. "Your combined propulsion and MHD power generation system that would provide full support capability immediately is perfect—just what we want."

  Keene made an open-handed gesture. "Well, of course it's yours. And whatever more I can do to help . . ." He checked himself as the broader possibility struck him as to why they might have brought him here. "Are you saying you might want me to leave the AG project, to move into this program?"

  "More than that," Vorse told him. "Maintaining bases that can operate viably on Earth will be crucial—both for remote outposts in the kind of venture Jon has described, or as centers to escape to if things go wrong out here. Either way, it's a new design and an untried concept. With what's at stake, it would be too risky to entrust operating them to anyone with secondhand knowledge. We want you there, as part of the first mission. We want you to go back to Earth."

  Keene slumped back in his chair, too surprised to respond at once.

  Foy smiled, as if acknowledging a joke that they had been keeping till the end. "It's ironic, don't you think, Dr. Keene, that because of this calamity that has happened, the new era that might take us back to where the Golden Age was leading will begin once again out here, at Saturn? And, answering your earlier question, that could be the ultimate meaning of everything that Kronia stands for."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Eventually, Rakki would challenge Jemmo's leadership of the clan, and one or the other of them would prevail. It was inevitable. Rakki considered himself to be the one who saw more and thought more. It had been his idea to place a second war party above the caves, which had contributed greatly to the speedy success on that day, and he had been the one to say that they should spare some of the Oldworlders to learn the secret of their weapons. And although Jemmo's fighting ability was unquestioned, Rakki had accepted the risk of letting himself be taken by the Cavers, which in his estimation made him an equal in valor. To serve indefinitely as Jemmo's lieutenant and inferior in status would be an insufferable affront to his pride. Jemmo knew it too. Rakki could see it in his eyes as he took in Rakki's measure when they talked, unconsciously weighing him up as an opponent, and he sensed it in the way Jemmo's face would harden, setting a margin of distance between them. And Jemmo, for his part, would never feel safe with the menace of a strong and competent potential rival who might move against him at any time. Rakki knew that too. Each was biding time, waiting for an advantageous circumstance. But the mo
ment would come soon.

  He stood near the cave entrance, watching Shell Eyes as she sat poring over the remnant of the Oldworlder vest that he had once worn, now torn, bloodstained, and almost coming apart into two pieces. She separated some of the strands that it was made from to see if she could devise a way of saving it. Rakki now wore a shoulder-wrap of skin sewn with sinew, which he had wanted ready for the expedition leaving the next day. With Jemmo's approval, he had set her and several other females the task of investigating the scraps of Oldworld materials that were left, such as the pieces of clothing taken from Bo and Scar-arm, and other oddments used as sleeping covers or for cleaning, to see if they could be duplicated. White Head had told them that such things in the Old World were made from the fibers of certain plants and soft down from the hides of animals. The women had collected samples of various plants and attempted to work them, but without success. Everything was too short and stiff, and could never weave together to form the fine, unbroken order that they found in the old fabrics.

  "The plants were a special kind," White Head said, squatting nearby in front of the place where he worked, shaping spear tips from hardstone. "Could be they never grew in these parts."

  "What they look like?" Rakki asked him. That could be another thing to look out for on the reconnoitering journey starting tomorrow.

  White Head made a helpless gesture. "I cannot tell you. It was not what I knew. I was just a herder of cows."

  Rakki frowned. "What is cow?"

  "Large animal. Bigger than hairhide."

  "You own? . . . Like those." Rakki motioned toward the pens holding the animals that had been inherited from the Cavers.

  White Head emitted one of his wheezing laughs. "That few! They are nothing. I work for Great Lord who owns them. More cows mean bigger worth. The land his cows needed to hold them was"—White Head waved toward the outside again—"here to the water on far side of swamp lands. More, even. Could be as far as fire mountains."