MacRoscope by Piers Anthony Read Free Book Online Page B

not afford to pay their debts were butchered; those who could not achieve sufficient success in life gained a few years of rich living by selling their bodies in advance for meat. It was a fashionable and comfortable mode of suicide, and at present some fifty percent of the individuals sublimated their lemming-instinct in this fashion. Yet the birthrate, fostered by competent medicine and the basic boredom of life, was such, and the average span of life before termination so long, that the population still nudged upward. The irreplaceable resources of the planet plummeted.
    “Why don’t they control their population?” Ivo demanded. “They’re breeding their way into extinction! Surely they can bring their birthrate down readily. They have the equipment for it.”
    “Why don’t we human beings bring
ours
down?”
    Ivo thought about that a moment and elected not to answer.
    “I had a dream the other night,” Brad said, still wearing the helmet and goggles though he obviously did not need to supervise the continuing image. It made him resemble some futuristic visitor from space, in contrast to his words. “I was standing on the top of a mountain, admiring the miracles my people had wrought upon the face of the Earth and on the structure of neighboring space, and I saw a live prob. It was a male proboscoid, very old and large and ugly, and it stood there upon a tremendous mountain of garbage and slag and bones and looked at me. Then it flopped down into the sludge of refuse and splashed it in my direction so that I flinched, and lifted its trunk and laughed. It laughed through its nose with the sound of a mellow horn, multiphonically, so that the melody seemed to come at me from all directions.
    “At first I thought it was amused at my upright, stout-legged stance that we have always assumed was necessary for any truly competent creature. Then it seemed that the mirth was directed at my entire species, my world itself. The peals of it went on and on, and I realized that it was saying to me, in effect, ‘We’ve been this route and now we’re gone. It is your turn — and you are too foolish even to learn by our example, that we spread out so plainly for you!’ And I tried to answer it, to refute it, to stand up for my people, but its humor overwhelmed me and I saw that it was already too late.”
    “Too late?”
    “Look at the statistics, Ivo. There may have been a quarter of a billion people in the world at the time of the birth of Christ. Today there are that many in the United States alone, and it is sparsely populated compared to some. The population of the world is increasing at a record rate, and so are its concurrent ills: hunger, frustration, crime. If our projections are accurate — and they are probably conservative — we have barely one more generation to go before it starts. That means that you and I will be on hand for it — and at a vulnerable age.”
    “Before
what
starts?
What
will we be on hand for, apart from the affluence of the twenty-first century?”
    “The inevitable. You saw it with the probs. And a few glimpses at the ghettos of the world — and some entire nations are ghettos — through the macroscope… I tell you, Ivo, things are going on right now that are horrifying. Remember Swift’s
A Modest Proposal
?”
    “Look. Brad, I’m
not
a professor. I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
    “Ivo, I’m not trying to tease you with my erudition. Some statements just aren’t comfortable to make too baldly. Jonathan Swift wrote, facetiously, of a plan to use the surplus babies of Ireland for food. The irony was, he made a pretty good case for it — if you took him literally, as a certain type of person might. He suggested that ‘a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled…’ He attributed the information to an American, incidentally, and perhaps his tongue wasn’t so