Just Gotta Love Them Tiny Feet, How Cute Her Toes Are
66Just Gotta Love Them Tiny Feet
By Tom Bridgeland
Carl Magnusson was a young man with a dream. An unusual dream in this placid, stable…most said stagnant…world of the late twenty-fourth century. He wanted to be rich. The richest man in the world. A Midas, a Rockefeller, a Gates.
Technology had made resources abundant, even with the plateau of science in the mid-twenty-first century, and the slowing of technological advance that had followed. The combination of cheap and reliable prophylaxis and societal pressure had turned child bearing from the norm to the exception. Human population peaked at just below nine billion, and fell swiftly. Only those who truly wanted children had them, and few chose to have more than one or two.
When in the early twenty-fourth century population fell below a half billion, people began to say the human race was headed for extinction. Too few were being born to maintain civilization, and a new dark age was coming, with little hope for any renaissance. People devoted themselves to hedonism. Fewer and ever fewer people had more and more resources to command, and pressure to change, to compete or advance, dwindled.
Carl, however, believed that change was coming, had already begun, in fact.
***
…Kyodo News Service: Great grandmother, 104, mother of twelve, gives birth to healthy baby girl in Tokyo City Hospital. “Oldest successful pregnancy to date," said Doctor. "I just wanted another baby," says mother…
***
"I believe in science," he said, to general laughter and mild, friendly disbelief. Carl laughed too, though he was perfectly serious. He usually was. A young man in an age of leisure, his friends and family could hardly understand him.
"Really," he said. "Those old boys really knew what they were talking about."
"Old boys is right," replied Carl's best friend, Olek Lasa. They had had this conversation before. "Since when have any of those fossils come up with anything new? Not since what, that super vacuum thing in the fifties? Has there been anything big since then?" He emphasized with a pointed finger. "Not that that came to anything, for all their big talk. Did it?" Olek laughed and punched Carl hard in the upper arm. "Let’s get back to the party, I saw a girl..." He grinned and flexed his muscles, showing off.
"You always saw a girl," Carl came back, rubbing his bruised arm with mock hostility, "but you never seem to catch her." Several of the guys standing around the makeshift bar laughed at that. A good jape, especially since it wasn't true at all.
Olek laughed too, waved jovially and left; most of the guys went with him, down to the beach where the girls were congregated in small groups around a bonfire. A few young men, more interested just this minute in beer and conversation with other guys, remained behind, clustered around a rough wooden camp table and a few dim gas lamps. Primitivism was the motif this season.
Carl opened the cooler, pulled out a half a dozen chilled beers of various marks, and passed them around. Everyone waited till he was done, and with the semi-serious formality of youth, raised the bottles to their teeth in unison and popped the caps. Spitting out the caps, they drank deep swallows and made the requisite masculine "ahh" sounds. From the beach came the sounds of a guitar and someone, probably Olek, singing. No, he wouldn't be alone later tonight.
Ceremony over, a slightly drunk Carl held forth, "Take that old Darwin, for example."
"You take him!" shouted one of the listeners, going along with the spirit.
"No, really," Carl returned, "That old man saw it all, change in species over time." Carl realized he wasn't being very coherent, and his listeners had only the most passing acquaintance with scientific theory to begin with. They seemed willing to let him talk though, so he continued. "Who has the most babies, that's who determines the future of the species. It doesn't matter who's the strongest or smartest, it is all about who has the babies."
"Women have the babies!" several of the listeners said in ragged unison. Most of them had heard Carl's theories more than a few times before, and knew what to come back. The group dissolved into general laughter, and the conversation turned to more important matters: beer, east or west European, marijuana, north or south American (one traditionalist holding forth noisily for naturally grown Jamaican), music, dancing, and of course, girls.
Late that evening, very drunk and a little high, Carl returned home alone. He had turned down several offers. His neat, spare physique and the contrast of a naturally dark complexion and bright blue eyes brought him a fair amount of attention. But he was in a philosophical frame of mind tonight (maybe that Jamaican guy is right) and had turned them down. He wasn't sure if the girls were more surprised, or he was. He grinned at the thought. Just a few years earlier, it would never have occurred to him to turn down an opportunity for sex. One attractive middle-aged woman had been quite insistent. "Let's make babies."
"I am an adult now, 35, not a boy to be thinking with my dick all the time," he said aloud, mocking himself. Thirty was the age of full majority, but most men didn't settle down to a job and marriage for years after that. Why hurry, with maybe a hundred, or even two hundred more years ahead of him? A little gene tweaking in the old days had guaranteed everyone of that.
Carl was contemplating his career. His friends and family were woefully convinced he was planning to become a scientist, as he had said since he was a boy. Now he wasn't so sure. His parents would be happy to hear that, no shameful living on charity for one of theirs.
Science was mostly natural history these days, looking at things and recording what happened. The slow accumulation of knowledge, exciting only for the enthusiast. The days of great competing theories and theorists had passed two centuries before. Carl thought that the plateau was nearly over, but he didn't kid himself that he was one of those great thinkers who would end it. Solid and practical, that was Carl. Except, maybe, for one insight.
He had spent several years in his early teens absorbed by history. One period that had particularly caught his interest was the invasion of North America by the European powers. Native populations had fallen in just a few decades from a high of perhaps a hundred million, to less than a million. The causes of this were still debated by academics, disease and social turmoil being the leading candidates.
Even more astounding though was the growth of the transplanted European populations, from a few million at the end of the seventeenth century, to over thirty million just a half century later. The rate of increase was the highest ever recorded in human history. Bust, then boom, and now bust again, no trend continues forever, Carl thought, as he philosophized sleepily on the future.
Engineering, civil space engineering, was a respectable if very boring career, the kind of thing that people with more brains than ambition got into. Like being a monk in the European middle ages, or a civil servant in the twentieth century, it was for people who valued security over adventure. Carl didn't think he was that kind of person, but space was where he could learn what he needed to learn, be where he needed to be.
Rockefeller, Gates, Vanderbilt. Men who had seen the future more clearly than everyone else around them, and made that future real with their own hands. He had read their histories and memorized their careers. Men despised and opposed, reviled by the history books, but he didn't care. Carl was on fire with the future. He was sure that he saw the future, and he wanted to be there, with his hands on the controls. His dreams that night were of the teeming, living cities of the twenty-first century, now mostly abandoned, home only to cliff-dwelling birds.
***
"Ready for burn," Carl stated for the record. "On my mark."
Carl felt an unaccustomed tension. He had participated in a dozen successful insertions since coming to space, but this one was special. It was the first one with his name on it. In large letters on the Space Property Registry of L5 Station, listed first under 'Owners,' was the name 'Carl Martin Magnusson,' followed by the names of a dozen friends and investors who had agreed to go along with him on a gamble.
Carl was there in person, not only because of his long experience in space, but also because as 'Owner' he had to be, to give the command. Business law in the twenty-fifth century was stark. Lessons had been learned in the disasters of the twenty-first century, and not forgotten. All business had to have a human being in control, directly and legally responsible. If anything went wrong, some person had to take full responsibility. The fictitious person, the business corporation, separating ownership from responsibility, was dead.
"Mark!"
The navigator pressed the button to officially start the burn, and a small computer did the final, minute calibrations that actually began it, just a split second later. A rocky lump of ice left its ancient orbital path for a new one, to intersect with the Earth in some forty years time. By that time powerful engines would have been mounted, and the ball of primordial hydrocarbons gently brought into a stable and safe orbit around the Earth.
Businessmen thought he was crazy, of course. What need for another lump of water and organics in high Earth orbit? There was overproduction as it was, factories were closing down, and people were out of work. If no one was in need, that was because everything was in full supply. There were not a thousand people on earth or in space who saw what he did.
When they learned that he planned another insertion, this time a metallic asteroid, there were screams from the trade press. No one tried to stop him of course. They didn't know that he had bigger plans yet. The tide was already turning.
***
"Isn't she so cute? I just love the little pink fingers. That scrunched-up little face. And those tiny little feet? You just have to love those tiny little feet! Aren't they so cute?" Maria Jerez Magnusson cooed over her fourth baby. The other children gathered around, examining with interest or jealousy their newest sister, just home from the maternity hospital.
Carl thought she was pretty cute too. He was glad Maria was home, the place just wasn't the same without her, and the kids ran wild when Mom wasn't here to take charge. He laughed at himself, caught up in family life as he was. It had all happened so suddenly, he was home from space for a vacation, visiting the family, when his mother and sisters sic a single friend on him at dinner. They know me better than I know myself, he thought, not for the first time. One sight of this Maria Jerez, and he was struck.
She hadn't had to hunt him down; he had jumped into the trap. He was the right age for marriage, just under a hundred, healthy and with a good income. And as he said himself, his looks had only improved with age. She was of course much younger, only fifty (so she said) and ready to start a family. Here they were, not ten years later, with their fourth. They would have had them sooner of course, but with the maternity hospitals all over capacity, it took careful planning and advance reservations to ensure a doctor would be available.
Carl smiled. He had never thought to be one of the instruments for fulfilling his own prophecy. It's all about who has the babies. Maria just loves babies.
***
Boom, then bust, then boom again. From a trough of less than five hundred million throughout the Solar System, population leveled and then began its new rise, slowly at first, but with relentless force, building speed. By the time Carl was two hundred and fifty, the first asteroids he had captured were used up, and many more were on their way inward. People had woken up to change, the human race alive again and growing like never before. Inevitably, resources tightened and prices rose. Carl went from penniless maverick to tycoon. His original investors, those who had stuck with him, hailed him as a new Midas.
"It is time for the next step," Magnusson said quietly as he paced the front of the room. People, seated around the table cut from raw asteroid iron and polished to mirror, leaned forward to catch his words. This man held the vision of the future. He held them in his hands, and he knew it. Those hands shook, and his face was heavily lined, but he hoped to complete one last project, the Great Work that he had first imagined as a boy of thirty-five, hundreds of years before.
"Now is the time to open up the Solar System. I propose we start with Neptune. We will break open the treasure trove of the King of the Sea." He laughed out loud at his private joke, and began to lay before his people the plans he had so carefully made. "This is for our children and grand children. They will need these resources, and more. Do not doubt it. This is my last project; after I am gone, one of you will have to take over for the next and the next steps. But for now, this is what we will do."
The plan he laid before them was grand, grandiose, but he shouted down their doubts, gave them the facts, the figures, and the science that convinced them. All that remained now was the engineering. The biggest engineering project ever attempted. Twenty billion people on Earth, billions already in space, and no end in sight. He thought of his own children, and their scores of children, and their many grandchildren. Maria would have been proud. No doubt she could have remembered everyone's birthday.
***
Olin Lasa turned to him and made a deep, formal bow. Magnusson wondered again when young people had relearned such things. Perhaps the pressure of living cheek by jowl was driving modern societies' mores. They treated him like a king of old, though he had never demanded such. He was a simple man, who still liked drinking beer on the beach, when he had the time.
"Magnusson, may I have the honor, father?" Olin asked in a carefully emotionless voice. So different from his father Olek. He was all emotion, love and joy and power right up to his last day. Magnusson inclined his head in assent, and the boy's eyes flashed. The father's emotion was all there, but narrowly channeled. This boy will go a long way. I'm glad Kate finally decided he was good enough. Thought that girl would never make up her mind.
Kate was his favorite among the grandchildren, and well past the age when she should have been married. People thought she was a little strange, single at almost a hundred. Olin had waited for her all those years. Magnusson thought she'd been more than a little cruel to the young man, but that was a woman's prerogative.
An infinitesimal seed of super-vacuum had been planted years before. Encased in a container of irreplaceable, almost untouchable dark matter, it had drifted down through the layers of Neptune's core to the gravitational center; now was the moment of germination. Procuring the dark matter, finding a way to lock it in place at the core had cost Magnusson his fortune. He was living on the family's charity now.
Olin's voice rang through the studiedly antique control room, "On my mark." The gathered witnesses drew breath, though there would be nothing to see for years as the seed grew, so slowly, then with greater and greater speed, climbing the exponential slope. Magnusson saw the parallel, though he didn't think many others did. Except perhaps Olin. He wished his own children had the man's drive; only Kate came close.
They were a good match. Olek had stood by him in all those years of poverty, more from loyalty to an old friend than from any deep interest in his theories. He was glad his bet had paid off, for his friend's sake as well as for his own. Their families were deeply entwined now, Olin and Kate only the most recent match. Funny that Olek had never married any of his long string of willing partners. Such a scandal it was, in these conservative times. He was gone, and Magnusson himself had outlived his time.
"Mark!" The fertilized seed began its growth.
***
Fed, it grew at the core of the great planet for more than two hundred years, shouldering aside the mass of the planet. The human race spread thickly through the solar system and deep into the beyond. Finally, the hollow, gravity-free hole at the center of Neptune became so great that bits the planet began to pearl off, smaller globes collapsing under independent gravity fields as they became too distant from his center to hold together.
The final exponential growth of the Demon Seed came with shocking speed. There was barely time to awaken the old man when the first pearls, Demon Spawn, the Resistors had been calling them, began to form.
Great jets of minutely controlled, superheated atmosphere pushed the newly formed planetoids away from the murdered planet and into orbit around their common center of gravity. Even the Resistors had to help now, or risk their own habitats. Their years of sabotage had proved fruitless, the dark matter walls of the Demon's Cage simply ignoring all of them; the event was at hand, even the most fanatically opposed was forced to act in unison with the Planet Killers.
Neptune was broken into thousands of smaller worlds, forming a complex miniature orbital system where once a single great planet had been. The human race had never had such great resources to play with. Surely they would last forever. Even the Resistors agreed with that assessment, though they disagreed with all else about the project.
The constantly shifting fields of gravity shed gaseous planetoids, some nearly as big as Mars, flinging them at random throughout the solar system. The core, much smaller but composed of denser elements, cracked into fragments to be captured and jockeyed into independent solar orbits. Many escaped to begin long, cold journeys into the beyond, humans riding piggyback.
With no mass at its center to hold them in orbit, the new system was a constant play of meeting and splitting, threatening always to coalesce back into a super-planet. Only the colossal engines, a hundred years in the making prevented it. An epic crime, and an opportunity, all one.
The old man watched. He had spent decades asleep, waiting for this moment. All those years, hundreds, he had worked to this end. In just a few weeks, Neptune had ballooned suddenly to overtake and surpass Jupiter, and the pearling process began. New worldlets in their thousands, created to provide the human race with the resources needed to get them over the current hump.
Some estimates said there might be a million billion people living between Sol and the farthest outer edge. Most of those lived in the beyond, where even Father Sol was reduced to a pinprick of light. Humans were spreading out in all directions, as fast as their ships could carry them. Catch a comet, attach an engine, a nudge to bring it down into the inner system for a slingshot, then up and out into the beyond. Thousands of ancient comets made that trip every year, and the fastest and farthest out were said to be approaching the nearer stars.
Magnusson felt the need for rest. His mind was still sharp; he wondered what would bring on the next bust. Lack of resources? Are we no more than bacteria, to populate ourselves into extinction? The edges would survive, he thought, but Sol System might become a dead zone, the sterile patch on a petri dish where a colony had once flourished before its sugar ran out.
Olin and Kate will be on one of those planets, going out. Wish I could go too. Thousands of his own would be on that planetoid, The Carl Magnusson, and on others headed out into the far beyond. He hoped a few of them would make it. How he loved those children.
It is almost time. Well wishers, strange way to think of them, hyenas more like, family mostly, were gathered in the hospital room, with its panoramic view of the living Heavens. He saw a young woman, a great something granddaughter who looked achingly like Maria, clutching a small baby. The baby was ignoring the historic show, peering with dark eyes over her mother's shoulder. Magnusson raised his hands and covered his face, then revealed it suddenly and said, "Boo!" The baby focused on him and he repeated the ancient game again, finally being rewarded with a bubbly smile.
The young woman noticed his game and made shyly to move back into the crowd, but he waved her closer. A play of emotions flitted across her face. He was, after all, the Demon Father Himself, the Planet Killer, evil old Magnusson. His own children, many of them, had disowned him. He wondered if she might be a Resistor. No matter, he was done with all that now. The history books would say what they would say.
The woman smiled uneasily, but the baby liked this old man, and laughed when he played his game. The woman, Risa Lasa, he saw by her nametag, came to the edge of his bed. He waved away his overzealous guards, "Let the baby come to me," he whispered. He stretched out a feeble hand and tickled her feet. She laughed and kicked wildly. Magnusson smiled. How I love their tiny feet.
He gestured the woman away, turned, and pressed the small red button on the table at his bedside. All of the busy nano machines in his wrecked body shut themselves off at the same instant, and he quickly began to lose consciousness. Into the beyond.
