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 toc- toc-toc-toc-to-to-to-t-t-ttttttt. After that Art went out into grey wet mornings, full of bird calls. 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 non-growth 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 bio-infrastructure. And that’s what I want Praxis to start doing. We obtain and rebuild whatever bio-infrastructure that has been depleted by liquidation. It’s long term investment, but the yields will be fantastic.”
“Isn’t most bio-infrastructure publicly owned?” Art asked.
“Yes. Which means close co-operation 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 measurement, 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 bio-infrastructure. We also have access to their labour. 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 involved with bio-infrastructure 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 colour 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.”
“No. But it is in trouble. When the first elevator crashed, its economy was shattered. Now the new elevator is in place, and things are ready to happen. I want Praxis to be ahead of the curve. Of course the other big investors are all still there too, jockeying for position, and that will only intensify now that the new elevator is up.”
“Who runs the elevator?”
“A consortium led by Subarashii.”
“Isn’t that a problem?”
“Well, it gives them an edge. But they don’t understand Mars. They think it’s just a new source of metals. They don’t see the possibilities.”
“The possibilities for …”
“For development! Mars isn’t just an empty world, Randolph—in economic terms, it’s nearly a non-existent world. Its bio-infrastructure has to be constructed, you see. I mean one could just extract the metals and move on, which is what Subarashii and the others seem to have in mind. But that’s treating it like nothing more than a big asteroid. Which is stupid, because its value as a base of operations, as a planet so to speak, far surpasses the value of its metals. All its metals together total about twenty trillion dollars, but the value of a terraformed Mars is more in the neighbourhood of two hundred trillion dollars. That’s about one third of the current Gross World