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colonies, increasing through the Federation Snake until one reached the dark age inside the Hercules Cluster, where almost four centuries after the war the twenty worlds of the Empire were still cut off from Earth and each other.
    “Well?” Grazia asked again.
    “It’s not you.…”
    Three times between 2000 A.D. and 5000 A.D. the Earth had destroyed itself in war, only to be rebuilt by its nearer colonies. That kind of help might never be available again. After the great war with Hercules, the colonies began to think of themselves first, while Earth, untouched within its own solar system, was turning away from planet-based societies. Earth was becoming a garden, slowly being enclosed by the worlds of the ring, its people slowly drifting away into the skyworlds. One day the mass of the Earth and the other planets would be gone, having been used to construct the component communities of the great shell that would one day finally surround the sun, to draw the sun’s energy until it was exhausted in the far future. For a time, at least, the planet would continue to belong to a humankind whose biology was relatively unchanged, to people like himself and Grazia.
    I have to get back to being interested in something , he told himself, in something other than comfort . His friends in the surrounding communities would laugh at him when he mentioned this need for demanding work. After all, he had studied the unities of art and science, experienced the pleasures and madnesses appropriate to his five decades of life. What else did he want?
    “I just feel that I should be risking something, adding to something,” he said.
    “That’s an old-time idea; you can have it subdued.”
    “But I don’t want it suppressed,” he said.
    She looked at him and smiled. “That’s a strange thing to say — you wouldn’t know afterward.”
    “Haven’t you ever wondered,” he said, “why we haven’t found any cultures different from our own, I mean really different from the humanoid patterns we know?”
    “Not really.”
    “Haven’t you wondered why they have been only as advanced as we are, give or take a little?”
    “That’s just the way it is. Nothing much depends on our finding out more about it.”
    “Maybe there is a superior culture out there in the galaxy — or maybe it exists only in the main group of galaxies and ours is a backwater. We haven’t gone out to look for them because we’re afraid. Maybe the war has made us distrust our curiosity? Maybe curiosity and ambition lead to violent conflict. I don’t know. It seems wrong …”
    “What nonsense,” Grazia said, “it’s enough that we’re kind and gentle and civilized.”
    “Look — we don’t even use our subspace communications system to search for advanced cultures, not even in our galaxy, much less beyond. We use the system to talk to our own worlds in the Snake. Doesn’t that strike you as narrow and unenterprising?”
    “We mind our own business, Raf.”
    “But look — we don’t even know much about ourselves, what we are, what life is beyond the textbook litanies.”
    “We’re the form of living matter that asks foolish questions about itself,” she said. “There are scientific people for these problems.”
    “But there aren’t, Grazia. You don’t know how few there are.”
    “Enough, I would say.”
    “A few hundred. Oh, there are many technical priests who know how to run things by looking up the answers which they don’t really understand. Too many areas of knowledge exist only in the computer intelligences and in old books. Very little of that lives in new human minds.”
    “It’s there, though.”
    “But what about new work, new questions?”
    “I think the artificial minds can do better,” she said.
    “They only care about knowing, not doing — they have no drive, no instincts to use what they have learned. Once they know, that’s enough.”
    “I’m glad they know — it would be such a burden. We’re made for the