Page 59 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Aquifer Virginalis

geographical orientation leading them to Starkerville. You didn’t say
anything about the character of those people, other than their being
part of a sort of divine-right kingship with high priests running the
show. Does that put them ahead or behind the two other groups in
terms of adaptability to crises? Oddly enough, I like Rutger’s idea of
having them not participate in the Clepsydra’s fight against
Starkerville, but on the grounds that the game was not worth the
candle and the well would soon run dry. But that would be a feint.
No matter which of the antagonists prevails and drives out the
other, the winner would soon have to leave when they see that the
Dowsers’ prediction came true. After all is abandoned, and they are
alone, then the Dowsers would make their move: their charts,
which no one else can decipher, indicate that Starkerville’s confined
aquifer sits on top of another one, containing even older and purer
water. They rebuild and rename the village, use their drilling
equipment to tap that deeper source, and end happily, if not ever
after.”
Fred Feghootsky shrugged. “I think you have to make a basic
decision about how to end a story set in conditions of universal
death and disaster. Do you want to be hopeful or despairing? If you
stick with the continued struggle for dwindling resources, and
cannot avoid the conclusion that finders won’t be keepers as long as
there’s not enough to go around, then how can it resolve positively?
Humanity, in its still-rapacious control of the planet, has behaved as
if managing and benefitting from the bounties of nature were a
zero-sum game. It wasn’t, at least not necessarily, but we blew our
chances to be other than a blight on the face of the earth. Now we
have self-prophetically turned it into a real game of musical chairs:
zero is soon going to be not just the net of that equation, but the
values on both sides of it. Any optimistic resolution of the battle
over your aquifer would constitute an almost revolutionary
valuation of the cooperative side of human nature.”
Hydrargyrum nodded slowly, realizing perhaps the crucial
problem to be solved first if she were to continue with her quartet
of doom stories. But Perversity Tinderstack had the last word.

58