Anticopernicus Read Free

very lovely and what’s the word?
    —I don’t know what the word is.
    —Pristine. Neat. Is it a person, or a robot?
    —You mean, gardening? The latter.
    —It’s very nice. And then, after a pause: I’m sorry you’re not on the
Leibniz
. I know you’re disappointed. But look on the bright side! If these Cygnic aliens are as horrible as all the rumours say, none of that crew will ever see home again.
    That didn’t bother Ange. Death frightened her not at all. What worried her was not death but the dead; which is to say what worried her was their overwhelming multitudinousness. If death is extinction she would be happy. For after all, there is something individual, something cleanly specific about extinction. Her worry was that she would somehow she
wouldn’t
die, but would find herself in a cavernous chamber containing all the outnumbering dead doomed to spend eternity in that hell of other people the old philosophers fretted about. And wasn’t there something true about that, too? It is the individual who dies, after all; just as it is the group—the species, the genes—that live on. Immortality is a mass event, and if you would flee the clamorous, overheated urgency of the great crowd then you can only, really, take solace in your own existential oblivion. A crowd flowed over Luna bridge. A crowd is a foule.
    Her animus against her fellow creatures was not rational, precisely, although it sometimes took a quasi-scientific form. This was how she thought of it, when she brought it consciously into her mind (something she did not often do): the weight of numbers is ruinous. The topography of the Earth is collapsing under the pressure even as humanity hurried to lunaform and areoform new landscapes. The petri dish is foaming with bacteria, has gobbled the disc of nutrient jelly to a sliver, and is still consuming it, although starvation must necessarily follow. When she was younger, before her marriage, Ange had been quite active in a Netherlands-based Ehrlich group, agitating for much more aggressive population control. It was not enough, she thought, to flatten the rising curve; human numbers had to be actively reduced. But the group eventually fractured: some stayed true to the group’s original Pimentelist beliefs; some insisted more radical Francipettian strategies were needful, and a small group declaring that mass terrorist action was needed. The bickering depressed and alienated Ange; she distanced herself from her former friends, and moved to a different country.
    All of that had happened a long time ago, now, on the far side of seven years of married life, a union that despite being untraumatic had been filled to the brim with ruin. To the
brim
. On the rare occasions she thought of her husband now, she saw in her mind’s-eye only a flank of cheek, dotted with black stubble; his D-shaped nose in profile, his eye caught by something away in the distance, something that wasn’t, ultimately, her at all.
    Alicia, speaking with what she fondly thought of as insight, told Ange what her problem was. You have trouble
empathising
with other people, she said. That’s why you like Mars so much. It’s so under
pop
ulated. Ange Mlinko thought this wrong on both counts. For, one thing she
didn’t
much like Mars—the deserts might be void of human life, but nobody ever went outside the pressurised homesteads, and
they
were high with the reek of population. And at any rate, it seemed to her that her problem was not a lack of empathy, but rather an
excess
of that debilitating human emotion. When she walked amongst a crowd of people, she felt the presence of each and every one. Most humans blanked the individuals, saw only the crowd. She seemed to lack the heartlessness to do that.
    Anyway: because she could hardly sit around watching the live feed from the
Leibniz
, and driving herself mad with what might have been—and because large single-occupancy houses with immaculately maintained gardens don’t come cheap in