Page 21 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Shangri-la South

“What’s the problem, Leith?” Cyril modeled mock outrage. “I
don’t know the percentage of science fiction stories that end
optimistically, but I’ll bet it’s been decreasing for years. Sorry I
pushed your button. How about giving someone else a chance to
speak?”
Mauker subsided. “Sorry. If another Dark Ages is coming—but I
don’t want to get into anyone else’s material. I’m done.”
“Then let me offer something,” said Perversity. “If these people
are smart enough to organize the enclave you describe, they must
also know entropy is against them. That is the overarching
commonality of all the things that can go wrong, defeating their
best-laid plans. So, as an ark rather than a permanent heaven-on-
Earth, there should be some recognition that they are in a race
against time: will they survive long enough to emerge fairly intact
after the great collapse of the world only to become hardscrabble
scavengers of whatever can be found to eat? That is your dramatic
tension, maybe related in flashbacks. I know, I know: this looks like
all those early tales about long-voyage starships in which the
mission has been forgotten and the passengers are clueless—or
worse. But how many original plots are there, anyway? And having
put all your eggs in one basket and declared them at least partly
rotten, what else can you do to evoke a bit of sympathy as well as a
boatload of antipathy?”
“Thanks, Perversity.” Kornfleck was noncommittal. “Definitely
something to think about.”
“Well, I, for one, would not abandon totally slamming these
arrogant bastards.” Rutger Schlager was as emotional as Mauker.
“They are at the apex of the species responsible for raping the
planet. Sure, you could identify a few of them as crypto-altruists,
but that strains my credulity: none of them got where they are by
being nice guys. They exemplify the worst in human nature: greed
and fear. Nature deserves, in the interest of fairness, to get revenge
on them. Bah! I say, let the earth open up and swallow them! Maybe
they didn’t get a proper environmental impact report—how’s that
for irony?—before they started construction: glacial runoff from
miles away undermines the supposedly stable foundations of

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