Chapter 27 third chapter

Gaia had been mortally wounded in the first century after the cataclysmic blunder, and was limping slowly toward death. During the Great Depression, the devastation was especially severe, with frequent spasms in the small plots, and the situation went from bad to worse, and after each attack, the situation that followed was more terrible, but the earth persevered and tried to repair itself. As I said earlier, the sanctuary is our playing field, but, in a sense, the whole dying planet is.When I was seven, my mother gave me my own electromagnetic car, and every place on this planet was within an hour's flight of my house.My best friend, Amalfi Schwartz, lives at Mount Erebus Estate, where the Antarctic Republic used to be.We see each other every day.The fact that teletransmitters were prohibited by the laws of the Old Lands did not bother us at all; we lay at night on some hillside, with our heads up, looking through ten thousand track lights and twenty thousand lighthouses in the star ring. To the starry sky, looking at the 20,000 to 30,000 stars visible to the naked eye.We have not a tinge of jealousy, nor any urge, to join the exodus.It is the great exile that hastened the weaving of the teletransmitters, and finally the world web.At the time, we were just happy.

The memory of my mom is so fixed in my head, it's weird, like she's just another figment of my Dying Earth.Maybe she is.Maybe I was raised by robots in the automated cities of Europe and milked by robots in the Amazon desert, or maybe I was just bred in vats like a beer brewer's yeast.I remember my mother's white pajamas slithering like a ghost through the shadowy rooms of the manor; as she sat in the conservatory, the light casting shadows, projecting ribbons and dust, she would pour a cup of coffee when , I remember the countless fragile blue veins on the back of his slender fingers; the candlelight entangled like a golden fly in the spidery brilliance of her hair, which was curled into expensive curls. A bun in feminine style.Sometimes I dream of her voice, the lilting tone, swirling in the womb, but then I wake up and find it's just the wind blowing through lace curtains, or some unknown ocean Beating against the rocks.

I've known since my first self-awareness that I would be, should be, a poet.It's not that I seem to have much choice; it's more like that dying beauty, sucking my last breath, gave the order: I'm doomed to play with words for the rest of my life, as if to compensate The massacre of our species in the bar world.Whatever it is, I became a poet anyway. I had a mentor named Balthazar, human but very old, the refugee from the carnal alleys of ancient Alexandria.Almost all of Balthazar glowed with a blue-white glow, the blue left over from an earlier immature Paulsonian treatment; he was like a glistening human mummy, sealed in liquid plastic.Moreover, this person is quite lecherous, and he is a well-known apprentice.Centuries later, when I was a sex lord, I finally understood poor Mr. Balthazar's impulses, but in those days manors didn't usually employ young chicks as servants.Mr. Balthazar will not discriminate against humans or robots, he will take everything.

I am still very lucky. Although Mr. Balthazar has a special hobby for young bodies, he will not attack the same sex. Therefore, his misbehavior is only manifested in: either he does not even see a person during the tutoring time, or Attention is spent unrestrainedly on memorizing poems and essays of Ovid, Chenish, or Wu Qiaozhi. He is an excellent mentor.We studied the Classical period, and the Near Classical period, and we did field trips to the ruins of Athens, Rome, London, Hannibal, Missouri, and he never gave me any quizzes or exams.Mr. Balthazar hoped that I could learn the ability of photographic memory, and I did not disappoint him.He convinced my mother that the so-called "progressive education" was flawed and not suitable for old families, so I never knew the shortcuts of brain stunts, such as RNA learning therapy, data network deep research, systematic retraining, programming The best talk groups require "higher-level thinking skills" that sacrifice facts, or planning without words.By eliminating these learning elements, I was able to recite Fitzgerald's translation of "The Odyssey" at the age of six, and I was able to write six verses before I learned to dress, and before I was connected to artificial intelligence. , I can think in spiral fugue.

My science education, on the other hand, was not strictly demanded.Mr. Balthazar has no interest in this, calling science "the mechanical side of the universe."It wasn't until I was twenty-one that I figured out what a computer was, what a retail department was, and that Uncle Kowa's star-shaped life support devices were actually machines, not the saving apparitions of souls around us.I believe in fairies and ghosts in this world, I believe in numerology, astrology, I believe in the magic of Midsummer's Eve, deep in the virgin forests of the North American reserve.Like Keats and Lamb in Hayden's studio, Mr. Balthazar and I will toast "mathematical chaos" and mourn the demise of rainbow poetry due to Mr. Newton's probing prisms.My early skepticism and, in fact, hatred of all things scientific and unemotional helped me immensely later in life.I have seen that it is not difficult to remain a pre-Copernican pagan in this post-scientific overlord.

My early poetry was really hideous, but I didn't realize it at the time because I was in the same boat as bad poetry.I am haughtily convinced that my act of creation still has value for the meaningless deaths I am gestating.Moreover, my mother tolerated me and let me throw those stinking doggerels in the house.She pampered her only child, even as he indulged in the excesses of pleasure, like an undisciplined camel.Mr. Balthazar never commented on my work; mainly, I think, because I never showed it to him.Mr. Balthazar thinks the venerable Danton is a liar, he thinks Samuel Brevi and Robert Frost should hang themselves with their own intestines, Wordsworth is an idiot, and all but Shakespeare's XIV All poetry except lines is a blasphemy of language.I don't know why I should show Monsieur Balthazar my poems, though I know they are full of budding talent.

I published a few fart articles in several hard-hitting publications, which at the time were popular among European eco-architecture families, whose amateur editors were as indulgent as my mother.Occasionally I would beg Amalfi or my other playmates (who are not as picky as I am, so they have access to data networks or hyperluminescent transmitters) to upload some of my poems to Halo or Mars, so Can spread to colonies of germinating teleporters.They never got back to me.I guess they are too busy. To believe that one is a poet or a writer before the ordeal of publication is as naive as a childhood dream of immortality... and as painful as the inevitable shattering .

My mother died with Old Earth.During that final cataclysm, half of the old families chose to stay; I was twenty, and I made my own romantic plan: to live and die with my homeland.But Mom had a different decision.What worries her is not my premature return, she is as selfish as I am, or even more selfish, and would never be considerate of others at that moment; nor is it that the death of my DNA will give this The aristocratic bloodline has come to an end, and this bloodline has been traced back to the "Mayflower" era.No, these didn't bother her at all. What my mother was worried about was: this family would be wiped out due to a huge debt.It appears that the money for our extravagance in the last few years was raised through huge loans from the Transwarp Bank and other prudent extraterrestrial institutions.The earth's continents are collapsing due to the impact of the contraction of the section. As a result, the huge forests are burning, the ocean heat waves are churning, turning into a pot of lifeless hot soup, and the air has become hot and thick and cannot be broken. Enter.And now, the bank has come to collect the debt.And I am the loan guarantor.

Or, to be precise, Mom's plan: She liquidated all available assets before that phrase became a reality, deposited two hundred and fifty thousand marks in a long-term account with the fleeing Transylvan Bank, and sent me on a trip To the Lifujin Atmospheric Protector at the Gate of Heaven, this is a small planet revolving around Vega.Even then, the gas planet had built a teleporter, connected to the solar system, and I didn't teleport.And not in the Solo Gyro, which uses Hawking drives and goes to Heaven's Gate once every standard year.No, my mother sent me to a three-phase impact spaceship to fly to this end of the remote place. The speed of the spaceship is much slower than the speed of light. It contains frozen livestock embryos, concentrated orange juice, and diner viruses. Press the spaceship Calendar, this journey will take me a hundred and twenty-nine years, with an objective time debt, which is: one hundred and sixty-seven years!

My mother calculated that the accumulative interest on that long-term account would be enough to pay off our family’s debts, and maybe allow me to live comfortably for a while.For the first and last time in her life, she had calculated wrongly.