There were no space elevators on Venus, because the planet rotated too slowly for such a system to work. So their ferry sprouted wings, and as they tore down through the atmosphere the windows torched yellow-white. They landed on a huge runway next to a domed city, then got into a subway car, and came up from that short ride into the city. There they found what seemed like the entire population in the streets. Kiran followed Swan through the crowds, and in a side street they went up some stairs into a little Mercury House, set over a fish shop. They dropped off their bags, then went back out to join the crowd.
The faces of the city were mostly Asian. People shouted, and in the din no one could hear well, so they shouted even louder. Swan looked at Kiran and grinned at his expression. “It isn’t always like this!” she shouted.
“Too bad!” Kiran shouted back.
Two big ice asteroids were apparently headed for a collision at the upper edge of the new Venusian atmosphere, roughly above the equator. This city, Colette, was three hundred kilometers north of the collision, and would therefore be quickly enveloped in a downpour. The rain would not stop for a couple of years,
Swan said, after which they would let a little light through their sunscreen and have more ordinary weather.
But first the big rain. Crowds stood around them waiting for it, singing and cheering and shouting. And right at midnight the southern sky lit up white, then incandescent yellow, then all the reds ever seen. The inside of the city looked briefly like they were seeing it in the infrared. The noise of the cheering was stupendous. Somewhere a brass band was playing—Kiran spotted the musicians, on risers across the square—several hundred trumpets, French horns, baritones, trombones, tubas, all the euphoniums, everything from miniature cornets to alphorns, playing immense dissonant chords that blatted in the air and shifted ceaselessly toward harmonies that never came. Kiran didn’t know whether to call it music; it sounded like they played without a plan. The effect was to make people shout and howl, leap and dance. They were making their sky.
Within the hour a wild rain had erased the stars and was drumming onto the dome as if trying to wash it away. They might as well have been at the bottom of a waterfall. The city’s lights bounced off the dome glass and came back somehow liquefied, so that shadows ran over people’s faces.
At some point Swan squeezed Kiran’s upper arm in a manner very like the way he had hers the night they had met. He felt the pressure, he knew what she meant; his blood burned up and down from the spot she held. “All right already!” he shouted to her. “Thank you!”
With a little smile she let him go. They stood in the streaming light, the dome a dim milky white over them. The roar of voices was like waves breaking on a beach of cobbles. “You’ll be all right?” she said.
“I’ll be fine!”
“So now you owe me.”
“Yes. But I don’t know what I can give you in return.”
“I’ll think of something,” she said. “For now, I’ll introduce you to Shukra. I worked for him a long time ago, and now he’s moved into some very high circles here. So if you work for him and do your best, and he likes you, then you’ll have your chance. I’ll give you a translator to help you.”
B
ack in Colette’s Mercury House they ate a breakfast, then Swan took Kiran across town to meet her friend Shukra. He proved to be a middle-aged man with a round cheerful face under a shock of white hair.
“Sorry about Alex,” he said to Swan. “I enjoyed working with her.”
“Yes,” Swan said. “Seems like everyone did.”
She introduced Kiran: “I met this young man when I went out to Jersey, and he got me out of a mess. He wanted a job, and I thought he might be someone you could use.”
Shukra heard this impassively, but Kiran could see from the bunching of his eyebrows that he was interested. “What can you do?” he said to Kiran.
“Construction, retail, janitorial, bookkeeping,” Kiran said. “And I can learn fast.”
“You’ll need to,” Shukra said. “I’ve got jobs that need doing, so we’ll get you into something.”
“Oh,” Swan said, “and he needs papers.”
“Ah,” Shukra said. Swan met his gaze without flinching. Now she was going to owe him, Kiran saw. “If you say so,” he said at last. “You are my black swan. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks,” Swan said.
After that she needed to get out to the spaceport to catch her flight. She took Kiran aside and briefly hugged him. “I’ll see you again.”
“I hope so!” Kiran said.
“It will happen. I get around.” She smiled briefly. “Anyway, we’ll always have New Jersey.”
“Lima,” he said. “We’ll always have Lima.”
She laughed. “I thought it was Stockholm.” And gave him a kiss on the cheek and was gone.
The economic model of the space settlements developed in part from their origins as scientific stations. In this early model, life in space was not a market economy; once you were in space, your housing and food were provided in an allotment system, as in Antarctic scientific stations. What markets existed tended to be private unregulated individual enterprises in nonessential goods. Capitalism was in effect relegated to the margin, and the necessities of life were a shared commons
exchange between Earth and individual space colonies was on a national or treaty-association basis, thus a kind of colonial model, with the colonies producing metals and volatiles, knowledge useful for Earth management, and later on, food
once the space elevators were in place (first at Quito, 2076) traffic between Earth and space increased by a factor of a hundred million. At that point the solar system became accessible. It was too big to inhabit rapidly, but the increasing speed of space travel meant that over the course of the twenty-second century the entire solar system came within easy reach. It is not a coincidence that the second half of this century saw the beginning of the Accelerando
the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or
change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils
one of the most influential forms of economic change had ancient origins in Mondragon, Euskadi, a small Basque town that ran an economic system of nested co-ops organized for mutual support. A growing network of space settlements used Mondragon as a model for adapting beyond their scientific station origins to a larger economic system. Cooperating as if in a diffuse Mondragon, the individual space settlements, widely scattered, associated for mutual support and
supercomputers and artificial intelligence made it possible to fully coordinate a non-market economy, in effect mathematicizing the Mondragon. Needs were determined year to year in precise demographic detail, and production then directed to fill the predicted needs. All economic transactions—from energy creation and extraction of raw materials, through manufacturing and distribution, to consumption and waste recycling—were accounted for in a single computer program. Once policy questions were answered—meaning desires articulated in a sharply contested political struggle—the total annual economy of the solar system could be called out on a quantum computer in less than a second. The resulting qube-programmed Mondragon, sometimes called the Albert-Hahnel model, or the Spuffordized Soviet cybernetic model, could be
if everyone had been working in a programmed Mondragon, all would have been well; but it was only one of several competing economies on Earth, all decisively under the thumb of late capitalism, still in control of more than half of Earth’s capital and production, and with its every transaction tenaciously reaffirming ownership and capital accumulation. This concentration of power had not gone
away but only liquefied for a while and then jelled elsewhere, much of it on Mars, as Gini figures for the era clearly reveal
in residual-emergent models, any given economic system or historical moment is an unstable mix of past and future systems. Capitalism therefore was the combination or battleground of its residual element, feudalism, and its emergent element—what?
with the success of the Martian revolution and the emergence of its single planetwide social-democratic system, the gates were opened for the rest of the solar system to follow. Many space settlements remained colonies of Terran nations and combines, however, so the ultimate result was a patchwork of systems somewhat resembling anarchy. Much of the space economy came to be dominated by a league of settlements called the Mondragon Accord. The Accord was renewed at a conference every five years, and annually the Accord’s AIs called out its economy, thereafter correcting it frequently (several times a second)
the longer the Mondragon Accord went on, the more robust it got. Confident in the Accord’s support of the necessities, individual settlements’ enterprise markets made more and more side deals, the so-called above and beyonds, all working on the margin. If not for Mars and its
as feudalism is the residual on Earth, capitalism is the residual on Mars
the margin itself grows with prosperity, resulting in increasing sophistication and culture
the existence of the marginal economy, semiautonomous, semi-unregulated, resembling anarchy, filled with fraud, double-
dealing, and crime, delighted all free marketeers, libertarians, anarchists, and many others, some enjoying the bonobo barter and others the machismo of a wild west and wealth beyond need
marginal capitalism is a tough-guy sport like rugby or tackle football, suitable mostly for people slightly overdosed on testosterone. On the other hand, with some rule and attitude changes, it has proven it can be an interesting game, even beautiful, like baseball or volleyball. It is a valid project at the margin, a form of self-actualization, not to be applied to the necessities, but on the margin a nice hobby, even perhaps an art form
confining capitalism to the margin was the great Martian achievement, like defeating the mob or any other protection racket
W
ahram was back in Terminator before Swan returned from Earth. At that point the city was sliding over the immense plain of Beethoven Crater, and Wahram screwed his courage to the sticking point and when she got into town, asked Swan if she wanted to go out with him to a facility in the west wall of Beethoven, to hear a concert and catch up on things. As he made the call, he was, he had to admit, nervous. Her quicksilver manner left him uncertain what to expect; he could not even predict whether he would be going out to Beethoven with her or with Pauline. On the other hand, he liked Pauline; so hopefully it would be all right either way. And with luck Swan would no longer be so intent to learn all there was to know about Alex’s plans concerning the qubes. That, Inspector Genette had made very clear, they had to keep from her.
In any case, the chance to hear some Beethoven was enough to spur him on. He made the call; and Swan agreed to go.
After that Wahram looked up the program for the performance they were to attend, and was excited to see it was a triple bill of rarely played transcriptions: first a wind ensemble playing a transcription of the
Appassionata
piano sonata; then Beethoven’s opus 134, which was his own transcription for two pianos of his
Grosse Fugue
for string quartet, opus 133. Lastly a string quartet was to play a transcription of their own for the
Hammerklavier
sonata.
Brilliant programming, Wahram felt, and he joined Swan at
the south lock of Terminator with an anticipation so strong that it overwhelmed the uneasiness he felt both about her and about being outside Terminator, on the surface of Mercury. Necessary movement westward—well, this was always true in some sense, he told himself, and focused his thoughts on the concert. Maybe there was no real reason for concern. It was interesting to think that he might be irrationally afraid of the sun.
At the little museum in the west wall of Beethoven, he was astonished to see that they were almost the only people in the audience, aside from the musicians not playing, who sat in the front rows to listen. The facility had an empty main room that would have held a few thousand people, but happily this concert was in a side hall with just a couple hundred seats, arced around a small stage in Greek theater style. Acoustics were excellent.
The wind ensemble, slightly outnumbering its audience, rollicked its way through the finale of the
Appassionata
in a way that made it one of the greatest wind pieces Wahram had ever heard, fast to the point of effervescence. The transcription to winds made it a new thing in the same way that Ravel had made Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition
a new thing.
When they were done, two pianists got up, and sitting at grand pianos snuggled into each other like two sleeping cats, they played Beethoven’s own opus 134, his transcription of his
Grosse Fugue
. They had to pound away like percussionists, simply hammering the keys. More clearly than ever Wahram heard the intricate weave of the big fugue, also the crazy energy of the thing, the maniacal vision of a crushing clockwork. The sharp attack of struck piano keys gave the piece a clarity and violence that strings with the best will and technique in the world could not achieve. Wonderful.
Then some other transcriber had gone in the opposition direction, arranging the
Hammerklavier
sonata for string quartet. Here, even though four instruments were now playing a piece written for one, it was still a challenge to convey the
Hammerklavier
’s
intensity. Broken out among two violins, viola, and cello, it all unpacked beautifully: the magnificent anger of the first movement; the aching beauty of the slow movement, one of Beethoven’s finest; and then the finale, another big fugue. It all sounded very like the late quartets to Wahram’s ear—thus a new late quartet, by God! It was tremendous to hear. Wahram glanced around at the audience and saw the wind players and the pianists were standing on their feet behind the chairs, bouncing, swaying in place, faces uplifted and eyes closed, as if in prayer; hands sometimes spastically waving before them, as if conducting or dancing. Swan too was back there dancing, looking transported. Wahram was very pleased to see that; he was out there himself in the space of Beethoven, a very great space indeed. It would have been shocking to see someone immune to it; it would have put her outside his zone of sympathy or comprehension.