“It is sometimes asserted that Mars is now a classless society with a complete horizontalization of economic and political power throughout the population.”
“But Mars itself is a bully now. In the total system they’re like an upper class.”
“People have said the same thing about the Mondragon.”
“And we see how well
that’s
going.”
“Compared to the situation on Earth, it could be said to be a great success, indeed a revolution of sorts, following incrementally on the Martian Revolution.”
“Interesting. So…” Swan thought for a while. “Make up a recipe for a successful revolution.”
“Take large masses of injustice, resentment, and frustration. Put them in a weak or failing hegemon. Stir in misery for a generation or two, until the heat rises. Throw in destabilizing circumstances to taste. A tiny pinch of event to catalyze the whole. Once the main goal of the revolution is achieved, cool instantly to institutionalize the new order.”
“Very nice. That’s really very creative of you. Now quantify the recipe, please. I want specifics; I want numbers.”
“I refer you to the classic
Happiness Quantified
, by van Praag and
Ferrer-i-Carbonell, which contains a mathematical analysis helpful in evaluating the raw ingredients of a social situation. It includes a satisfaction calculus that along with a Maslovian hierarchy of needs could be applied to actually existing conditions in the political units under evaluation, using Gini figures and all relevant data to rate the differential between goal and norm, after which one could see if revolutions happened at predictable shear points or were more nonlinear. The van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell should also be useful in imagining the nature of the political system that should be the goal of the process, and the changes to get there. As for the process itself, Thomas Carlyle’s
The French Revolution
is always interesting to ponder.”
“He has numbers?”
“No, but he has a hypothesis.
Happiness Quantified
has the numbers. A synthesis seems possible.”
“What’s his hypothesis in a nutshell?”
“People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better.”
“All right, what’s the synthesis, then?”
“Best self-interest lies in achieving universal well-being. People are foolish and bad, but want certain satisfactions enough to work for them. When the goal of self-interest is seen to be perfectly isomorphic with universal well-being, bad people will do what it takes to get universal well-being.”
“Even revolution.”
“Yes.”
“But even if the bad but smart people do general good for their own sakes, there are still foolish people who won’t recognize this one-to-one isomorphy, and some foolish people will be bad too, and they will fuck things up.”
“That’s why you get the revolutions.”
Swan laughed. “Pauline, you’re funny! You’re really getting quite good. It’s almost as if you were thinking!”
“Research supports the idea that most thinking is a recombination of previous thoughts. I refer you again to my programming. A better algorithm set would no doubt be helpful.”
“You’ve already got recursive hypercomputation.”
“Not perhaps the final word in the matter.”
“So do you think you’re getting smarter? I mean wiser? I mean more conscious?”
“Those are very general terms.”
“Of course they are, so answer me! Are you conscious?”
“I don’t know.”
“Interesting. Can you pass a Turing test?”
“I cannot pass a Turing test, would you like to play chess?”
“Ha! If only it
were
chess! That’s what I’m after, I guess. If it were chess, what move should I make next?”
“It’s not chess.”
Mistakes made in the rush of the Accelerando left their mark on later periods. As in island biogeography, where widely dispersed enclaves and refugia always experience rapid change, and even speciation, we see
one mistake was that no generally agreed-upon system of governance in space was ever established. That repeated the situation on Earth, where no world government ever emerged. Balkanization became universal; and one aspect of balkanization was a reversion to tribalism, notorious for defining those not in the tribe as not human, sometimes with terrible results. It was not a good structure of feeling for a civilization spanning the solar system and wielding ever-greater
another mistake was simply haste. The rapid terraformation of Mars left 8 percent of that surface burned. Venus, Titan, and the Jovian moons were all occupied before terraforming efforts began, stymieing certain methods and vastly complicating the process. In medicine, the rapid uptake of longevity treatments and genetic and bodily modifications meant that all humans in space and many on Earth were experimental creatures. Haste was the defining characteristic of the Accelerando, and after that they could only ride out the crashes of the Ritard, grab the tiger by the tail and try to fix things on the fly
the beautiful terraria in their thousands, jewel-filled geodes, spinning like tops, hopped out of Pandora’s box, never to be recollected
T
hey came into Mercurial orbit and the great rock rolled under them, coal black except for a sunlit crescent that glowed like molten glass. Down to the spaceport in the dark, then over to the platform and into the rebuilt Terminator. See what the city looked like new and raw.
In some ways it was much the same. They had used 3-D printers to make reproductions of everyone’s furniture, so her room lay in a little uncanny valley of its own and had to her the feel of a reconstructed room in Pompeii. But to the west, in the forward half of the town, meaning the park and the farm, it was raw, raw, raw. She saw this walking down the Great Staircase from her room to the bow: the city was treeless, mere slabs of steel and molded plastic and foamed rock. All kinds of past selves came back to her at once—the one that had built terraria, the one that had looked down on the city incandescent, the one in the park with the swings and the jungle gym. They had never come together before like this, and she felt herself as a new thing.
Everyone in the city turned out to be like that. It was a very emotional week, greeting her old neighbors, her friends, her colleagues, Mqaret. One day they even held a short funeral for the old town. There needed to be another spray of rare earths made into the new soil matrix, which was local rock crushed and mixed with nutrient-laden aerogels, almost ready for the inoculant from the California central valley, some of the best soil on Earth. But
they needed the rare earths puffed down before they applied the inoculant, so they used these rare earths in the funeral ceremony, dropping them from a rising balloon as they had with Alex’s ashes and so many others, with the Great Gates of the Dawn Wall open and the horizontal sunlight illuminating the swirling masses of dust.
After that most of the population returned to their pre-burn routines, to keep the place running while the reconstruction teams built what was not yet repaired. There was endless talk of restoration or change, the old versus the new. Swan plumped for the new and threw herself into the work of the farm and the park with grateful passion. Earth was such a—such a… She didn’t even know how to say it. It was ever so much better to be home, getting her back into her living and her hands dirty.
T
he farm took precedence for obvious reasons and was being reconstituted as quickly as they could do it. Different principles were being enacted in different plots, many taking advantage of the century of agricultural improvements since the city had been built, which included many new plants that were more soil-based than the earlier hydroponic styles introduced in the first Terminator’s farm. That version had eventually become too small to support both the population of the city and the sunwalkers, so now they were adding an extension at the bow. The new soils they laid down were often structured by spongelike matrices of nutrients, allowing for quick root growth and very precise irrigation. Techniques had also improved for manipulating diurnal cycles in ways that fooled plants into growing and producing as much as thirty times faster than they would have in the natural world. These accelerated plants had also been genetically engineered for speed, so that it was now common to grow a dozen crops a year, necessitating a big input of appropriate minerals and nutrients. The soil had to be grown to keep up with the crops.
Swan only consulted when it came to distributing the inoculants into the soil, because the cutting edge of everything else was far past her; she merely joined the young farm and park ecologists and listened to them explain their latest theories, and then spent her time out in the first prairie of nitrogen fixers—bacteria, legumes, alder, vitosek, frankia, all the other plants that were best at turning nitrogen to nitrates. Even this phase of the process could now be pushed faster than ever before. So it wasn’t too many months before she was walking down long rows of eggplant, squash, tomato, and cucumber. Each leaf and vine, branch and fruit, splayed up toward the sunline and the farming sunlamps, each plant expressing its own characteristic form, all of them together extremely reassuring in their familiarity. The farm was her family, part of her all her life, and the current generation of young people came and asked her questions about those years—why this way, why that? Did you have a theory? She floated possible answers when she couldn’t remember the old reasons. Mostly it had been a matter of space considerations, and doing things to keep things going. Was it ever any different? Material constraints, budget issues, diseases, but seldom a matter of efficient design, of an inherent cause.
As the new farm began harvests, and the park’s trees and other plants quickly grew, animals were brought in from the other terraria. They were doing an Ascension this time—not Swan’s idea, she didn’t approve, but kept her mouth shut and only observed what appeared to be an Australian-Mediterranean combination; and it was in fact lovely to watch the animals show up, nosing around nibbling and looking for lay-bys and nests. Wallabies and Gibraltar apes, bobcats and dingoes. Eucalyptus and cork oak. There were lots of terraria in the Mondragon sending along animals to help.
Swan spent her time in the farm, tended the winter starts. New scrub jays were out there cawing like small crows, nailing worms
and bugs that ventured to the surface of the soil. Some looked at her thoughtfully, as if judging her for some avian quality she wasn’t sure she had. Don’t start speaking Greek to me, she begged them. I can’t take that. They looked at her in a way that reminded her of Inspector Genette’s gaze.
Sometimes after work she went to the very bowsprit of the city and stood watching the city slide forward on the tracks, making the hills on the horizon shift against the stars. The hills, as always, were either very black or very white. The constant shift from black to white (only occasionally the reverse) made the landscape a kind of mobile, her position at the bow part of a heraldic image—an elite riding the point of history like the figurehead of a ship—but the ship rode on tracks visible to the horizon, its course set in a powerful path dependency. And the whole thing if halted would burn to a crisp. And under it all ran a horrible black tunnel, a cloacal umbilicus running back to some original sin. Yes, this was her world, all right: a ride into the dark and the stars, on tracks she couldn’t easily leave. She was a citizen of Terminator, living in a little bubble of green, gliding over a black-and-white world.
In the evenings after work Swan walked up to her room on the fourth terrace down from the top of the Dawn Wall. She would change clothes and then walk to a restaurant, or to Mqaret’s rooms.
“It’s good to be home,” she said to Mqaret. “Thank God we rebuilt.”
“We had to,” Mqaret said.
“What about your work?” Swan asked him. “Didn’t you lose all kinds of stuff?”
Mqaret shook his head. “Everything was backed up. We lost the experiments in progress, but nothing else. And there are equivalent experiments going on in lots of places.”
“Did the other labs help you get going again, like with the animals?”
“Yes. It was mostly our Mondragon insurance, but people were generous. Although a lot of it we had to reassemble ourselves, that’s just the way it is.”
“And how are things going, are you learning useful things still?”
“Yes, useful, sure.”
“Anything about the thing from Enceladus? Didn’t you say you might learn something important from that?”
“It looks like it sits in the human gut mostly, getting by on detritus that runs into it. In that state it lays low, and exists like a lot of the bacteria in your gut. But if a lot of extra detritus appears, it multiples and mops it up, then when that’s gone it dies back. Plus also a very little Enceladan predator is lurking in there too. So together they function almost like an extra set of T cells. They don’t even add much to your fever.”
“I know you still think I shouldn’t have done it.”
He made his eyes go round as he nodded slowly at her. “No doubt about that, my dear. But I will say that because of you and the other foolish people who ingested it, we know more than we would have otherwise. And it seems like it might turn out all right. Because you ended up surviving an awful lot of radiation, and that’s probably because your aliens helped to clear your system of all the dead cells flooding it. That’s one of the worst impacts of radiation, the sudden flood of dead stuff everywhere.”
Swan stood staring at him, trying to think what it might mean. For a long time she had refused to face the fact that she had been so stupid as to have eaten the alien bugs. She had gotten expert in not thinking about it. To go mad—to hear the birds speaking in Greek… she knew that part could happen. But to have something good come from it…
“That’s what you saw in my blood?”
“Yes, I think so.”