Текст книги "2312"

Автор книги: Kim Stanley Robinson

Соавторы: Kim Stanley Robinson
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“I knew you would like it.”

The camp’s plateau made a perfect location for what was really a little hodgepodge of a town. After showing her the galley and getting her stuff stowed in the dorm, Zasha took her out to the edge that overlooked the glacier. Directly below the camp the ice was shattered all the way across to the other wall of the glacier. This apparently was the result of injecting liquid nitrogen between the ice and the bedrock. A certain amount of ice had been tacked down, but the ice over that had sheared off and continued on its way, shattered and slower, but still moving.

Downstream from that jumble there curved a deep gap in the ice. “That’s their latest experiment,” Zasha said, pointing. “They’re going to melt a gap all the way across, and keep melting the ice as it comes down. The ice downstream will slide away, and having cleared a space, they’re going to build a dam in the empty air, and when it’s done let the upstream ice come down to it.”

“Won’t the ice just flow over the dam?” Swan asked.

“It would, but they plan to build it so high that it will match the height of the interior ice cap. So ice will flow here until it rises up as high as the rest of Greenland, and then there won’t be any downward flow.”

“Wow,” Swan said, startled. “So, like a new ridge of the mountain range, filling this gap? Created while the ice is flowing down at it?”

“That’s right.”

“But won’t the ice up on the plateau just flow down other glaciers?”

“Sure, but if it works here, they plan to do it all the way around Greenland, except at the very north end of the island, where they’re trying to keep the sea ice park supplied anyway. They’ll corral what slides in up there, and slow the outfall, and that will keep the Greenland cap substantially in place, or at least really slow the melting down. Because it’s the sliding into the sea that makes it all happen so fast. So—we’ll stop up every break on the island! Can you believe it?”

“No.” Swan laughed. “Talk about terraforming! This must be a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers idea.”

“It sounds like it, but these are Scandinavians here. Plus the local Inuit. Apparently they like the idea. They regard it as a temporary measure, they said.” Zasha laughed. “The Inuit are great. Very cheerful tough people. You would like them.” A quick glance. “You could learn from them.”

“Shut up with that. I want to go down there and see what the bedrock looks like.”

“I figured you would.”

They went back to the galley, and over big mugs of hot chocolate some of the engineers in the camp sat with them and described their work to Swan. The dam was going to be made of a carbon nanofilament weave, somewhat similar to space elevator material, and it was even now being spun over foundation pilings drilled deep into the bedrock. The dam would rise from the ground, spun in place by spiderbots rolling back and forth and passing each other like shuttles on a loom. The dam, when completed, would be thirty kilometers wide, two kilometers tall, and yet only a meter thick at its thickest point. The structuring of the dam’s material was another biomimetic, the carbon fibers shaped like spiderweb strands but woven like seashells.

Downstream from the dam a short new glacial valley would be exposed. This would revegetate just as the other little green parts of Greenland had at the end of the ice age, ten thousand years before. Swan knew just how the U-valley would turn from bare gray rock into a fellfield biome, having induced it to happen in many an alpine or polar terrarium. Without assistance it would take about a thousand years, but with some gardening the process could be shortened a hundredfold: just add bacteria, then moss and lichen, grasses and sedges, and after that the fellfield flowers and ground-hugging shrubs. She had done it; she had loved it. From now on things here would every summer be exfoliating, flowering, casting seed; every winter it all would tuck into its subnivean world happily, and then struggle through the thaw and melt of a new spring, the really dangerous time. The ones that didn’t make it through the tough spring would provide food and soil for the ones that came after them, and on it would go. The Inuit could garden that if they wanted to, or let it go its own way. Maybe try different things in different fjords. How Swan would love to do that. “All right, maybe I need to become an Inuit,” she muttered at Z, staring at the map spread before them. She saw that Greenland itself was a whole world, and her kind of world—empty—therefore no one mad at her.

After dinner Swan went back outside and stood with Zasha above the great gap of air, under the huge dome of the sky. Out in the wind, oh the wind, the wind… The broad glacier below her—upstream a white shatter—downstream a blue gap—then a lower and smoother white sheet, rushing off to the sea. On the low wall of the dam she could now make out machines, running back and forth on both its top and its sides, looking a little bit like spiders, in fact, weaving a web so dense it was solid. The mountain ridges anchoring the two ends of the dam would wear away before the dam did, one of the engineers had said. If another ice age ever came, and the Greenland ice cap piled farther into the sky and overflowed this dam, the dam would still be there and would reemerge in the next warm period.

“Amazing,” Swan said. “So terraforming canbe done on Earth!”

“Well, but Greenland is more like Europa than Europe, if you see what I mean. You can do it here because there are only a few locals, and they like the plan. If you were to try this kind of thing anywhere else…” Zasha laughed at the thought. “Like they could use this technology and polder New York Harbor, drain the bay down so that Manhattan was above water the way it used to be. You could make the whole area like a Dutch polder. Not even that difficult, compared to some things. But the New Yorkers won’t hear of it. They like it the way it is!”

“Good for them.”

“I know, I know. The fortunate flood. And I love New York the way it is now. But you see what I mean. A lot of good terraforming projects just won’t ever get approved.”

Swan nodded and made a face. “I know.”

Zasha gave her a brief hug. “I’m sorry about what happened to you in China. That must have been awful.”

“It was horrible. I really don’t like what I’m seeing this trip. In different ways we seem to have offended almost everyone on Earth.”

Zasha laughed. “Did you ever think it was otherwise?”

“Fine,” Swan said, “maybe so. But the thing is, now we have to find who attacked Terminator.”

“Interplan is the organization that has the closest to a total human database, so hopefully they will manage to find them.”

“What if that doesn’t work, what then?”

“I don’t know. I think it will work, eventually.”

Swan sighed. She wasn’t sure Genette’s team could do it, and she knew she couldn’t do it. Zasha gave her a look. “I’m not having fun anymore,” she explained.

“Poor Swan.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I think so. But look, just go help gather the new inoculants for Terminator. Do your job, and let Genette and Interplan do their jobs.”

Swan was not happy with this either. “I can’t just leave it. Something’s going on. I mean, I was kidnapped, damn it, and asked a lot of questions about Alex. You said she didn’t trust me at the end, but what if I knew something I didn’t know was important?”

“Did they ask you about things on Venus?”

Swan thought it over; something had been triggered. “I think maybe so.”

Zasha looked worried. “There’s some strange stuff happening on Venus. When they get to the next stage of their terraforming, a lot of the planet will open to new settlements, and that’s causing fights to break out. Real estate wars, in effect. And these strange qubes Alex started us looking for, we’re finding more and more of them. They seem to be coming from Venus, and they often show up around New York. We’re not sure what it means yet. So, but just go help get the inoculants together. That’s not as easy as it used to be.”

“They just need to replace what we had before.”

“Not possible. They won’t let you take topsoil off Earth in anything like the quantities they used to. So our new soil is going to have to be some kind of Ascension, and you’re the expert at those.”

“But I don’t like Ascensions anymore!”

“They’re necessary now. It’s not a style choice.”

Swan heaved a great sigh. Z stayed silent, then gestured out at the scene. It was true: this glacier was a sight for sore eyes. The world was bigger than their petty melodramas, and as they stood here it couldn’t be denied. And that was a comfort.

“All right. I’ll go help with the soil. But I’m going to keep talking to Genette.”

So—back to Manhattan, freakish and superb, but without Zasha there to make it fun. And besides, things weren’t fun anymore.

The weariness that came at the end of the day on Earth. The sheer heaviness of life on Earth. “She’s so… heavy!” Swan sang to herself, dragging out the last word and repeating it in the way of the old song. “Heavy—heavy—heavy—heavy!”

Usually when she hurt in the effort to hold herself upright at the end of a day, she would get into her body bra and relax, let it walk her around. It was like getting a massage, just to be carried, lifted up as you walked. Let it dance you, melt into it. Oh lovely waldo. It stiffened under you no matter how you moved, and when fitted and programmed right, it could be dreamy; bad for bone building, bad for a full adjustment to life on Earth, but a lifesaver when flagging. People in space talked longingly about moving back to Earth, people went back for their sabbatical happily, crowing at the prospect—but after the thrill of the open air wore off, the g remained, and slowly but surely it dragged one down, until when the sabbatical year was over and one had had one’s Gaian replenishment, whatever it was, one rose back out of the atmosphere into the brilliant clarity of space and resumed life out there with relief and a feeling of ebullient lightness. Because Earth was just too damned heavy, and in every possible sense. It was as if a black filter had been dropped between her and the world. Inspector Genette had said things were going well, but obviously had no expectation of anything happening soon. The case seemed to be regarded as Swan would regard the growing of a marsh; you set certain actions in motion, created certain conditions of possibility, and then went away and did something else. When you came back, you would see that things had changed. But it would be years.

So she worked on soil acquisition for Terminator, advising the Mercurial traders on the commodities market, and one day she was able to go to the Mercury House in Manhattan and say, “We’ve got all the inoculants. We can go home.”

She went to Quito and took the space elevator up to its anchor rock, feeling balked and defeated, invaded and tossed aside. She brooded through repeat performances of Satyagraha—ascending with its final notes, simply the eight rising notes of an octave repeated over and over. She sang along with the rest of the audience, wondering what Gandhi would do about this, what he would say. “The very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of Satyagraha.” Thus Gandhi in the program notes. Satya, truth, love; agraha, firmness, force. He had made the word up. Tolstoy, Gandhi, the opera’s Future Man: they all sang of hope and peace, of the way to peace, satyagraha itself. The Satyagrahi were the people who enacted satyagraha. “Forgiveness is the ornament of the brave.”

As the Earth slowly receded below her, becoming the familiar blue-and-white ball, chunking space with its marbled glory, she listened to the Sanskrit lyrics bouncing in her ear. She asked Pauline to translate one haunting turn in the melody; Pauline said, “Until there is peace, we will never be safe.”

Lists (10)

It’s too hard, there isn’t time, someone might laugh;

To protect one’s family, to protect one’s honor, one’s children;

Kin selection; bad seed;

Original sin, intrinsic evil, fortune, luck, destiny, fate;

Sloth, avarice, envy, malice, jealousy, anger, rage, revenge;

For the hell of it

Because someone else might be taking advantage

Because

No one knows for sure

It doesn’t make any difference

It’s written in the stars

No one told us not to

We can get away with it

There’s no such thing as utopia

It probably wouldn’t work anyway

It might make some money

There isn’t enough for everyone

People don’t appreciate what you do for them

They don’t deserve it

They’re lazy

They aren’t like us

They’d do the same to you if they could

PLUTO, CHARON, NIX, AND HYDRA

Pluto and Charon are a double-planet system, tidally locked to each other like two ends of a dumbbell, same sides always facing each other, and their center of gravity out there between them. They rotate out of the plane of their orbit around the sun, and their days are a bit over six days long, with their years 248 years long. Pluto is ten K colder than it would be if it didn’t have its atmosphere, which in freezing at apogee and subliming at perigee creates a reverse greenhouse effect and cools the surface. The atmosphere is as thick as Mars’s original atmosphere, around seven millibars—in other words, not very thick. Surface temperature is forty K.

Charon, half the size of Pluto, has a surface temperature of fifty K. The next closest moon-to-planet size ratio is Luna to Earth, with Luna one-fourth the size of Earth. Pluto has a 2,300-kilometer diameter; Charon, 1,200 kilometers. Both have rock cores and mostly water ice shells.

Two much smaller moons orbit the bigger pair: Nix and Hydra, at 90 and 110 kilometers in diameter. Nix, at 80,000,000,000,000,000,000 (eighty quintillion) kilograms, mostly ice with some rock, is currently being disassembled and processed into four starships, which are to be sent roughly as a group, though the first is scheduled to go ahead, in part to test the systems being built. The interiors of the starships are typical terrarium cylinders, spinning to create an interior gravity effect. They are being stocked with a very large number of species, spanning several biomes. The four ships are intended to stay in contact, and will reduce the genetic impacts of their islanding by occasional exchanges. The engines installed in the sterns will combine mass drivers with antimatter plasmas to run for a century, followed by a powerful Orion pusher plate, eventually reaching speeds at which ramjets will work, and these will be deployed in their turn. All together these engines will accelerate them to 2 percent the speed of light, a truly fantastic speed for a human craft, thus reducing their trip time to only two thousand years. For the stars are far away. And the nearest ones to us have no Earthlike planets.

Sorry, but it’s true. It has to be said: the stars exist beyond human time, beyond human reach. We live in the little pearl of warmth surrounding our star; outside it lies a vastness beyond comprehension. The solar system is our one and only home. Even to reach the nearest star at our best speed would take a human lifetime or more. We say “four light-years” and those words “four” and “years” fool us; we have little grasp of how far light travels in a year. Step back and think about 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second—whichever you think you can grasp better. Think of that speed as traversing 671 million miles in every hour. Think about it traversing 173 astronomical units a day; an astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, thus 93 million miles—crossed 173 times in a day. Then think about four years of days like that. That gets light to the nearest star. But we can propel ourselves to only a few percent of the speed of light; so at 2 percent of the speed of light (ten million miles an hour!) it will take about two hundred years to go those four light-years. And the first stars with Earthlike planets are more like twenty light-years away.

It takes a hundred thousand years for light to cross the Milky Way. At 2 percent of that speed—our speed, let us say—five million years.

The light from the Andromeda Galaxy took 2.5 million years to cross the gap to our galaxy. And in the universe at large, Andromeda is a very nearby galaxy. It resides in the little sphere that is our sector of the cosmos, a neighbor galaxy to ours.

So. Our little pearl of warmth, our spinning orrery of lives, our island, our beloved solar system, our hearth and home, tight and burnished in the warmth of the sun—and then—these starships we are making out of Nix. We will send them to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again.

PAULINE ON REVOLUTION

Swan accompanied the inoculants back to Mercury in the first transport available, which was a terrarium only partly finished. At the moment it was impossible to tell what it would become, as it was an empty cylinder of air with rock walls, a sunline, and a spindly jungle gym of framing struts, bolted onto concrete plugs in the raw rock of the interior wall. Swan stared at the people around her in the immense steel frame of the skyscraper, none of them known to her, and realized it had been a mistake to take this flight—not as bad as the blackliner, but bad. On the other hand, considerations of convenience seemed trivial to her now. She walked up flight after flight of metal stairs to get onto the open rooftop of the skyscraper, which was almost touching the sunline. From the low-g roof she could look down—out—up. Everywhere it was a heavily shadowed cylindrical space, crisscrossed with struts, floored by bare rock. The building was like a single lit corner in a castle of sublime immensity; the ground at the foot of the skyscraper was several kilometers below, the ground on the far side of the sunline only a bit farther away. A Gothic ruin, with some poor mice people huddled around the warmth of a final candle. It had not been like this in the early days, when a newly hollowed cylinder was the very shape and image of possibility. That her youth had come to this—that the whole of civilization was really something like this, badly planned, incomplete—

Swan hooked her elbows over the rail to get some stability in the low g. She put her chin on her crossed hands and, still regarding the scene, said, “Pauline, tell me about revolution.”

“At what length?”

“Go on for a short while.”

“ ‘Revolution,’ from the Latin revolutio, ‘a turn around.’ Refers often to a quick change in political power, frequently achieved by violent means. Connotation of a successful class-based revolt from below.”

“Causes?”

“Causes for revolution are attributed sometimes to psychological factors, like unhappiness and frustration; sometimes to sociological factors, especially a systemic standing inequity in distribution of physical and cultural goods; or to biological factors, in that groups will fight over allocation of limited necessities.”

“Aren’t these different aspects of the same thing?” Swan said.

“It is a multidisciplinary field.”

“Give me some examples,” Swan said. “Name the most famous.”

“The English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Taiping Rebellion, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, the Martian Revolution, the revolt of the Saturn League—”

“Stop,” Swan said. “Tell me why they happen.”

“Studies have failed to explain why they happen. There are no historical laws. Rapid shifts of political power have occurred without violence, suggesting that revolution, reform, and repression are all descriptors too broad in definition to aid in causal analyses.”

“Come on,” Swan objected. “Don’t be chicken! Someone has to have said something you can quote. Or even try thinking for yourself!”

“That’s hard, given your insufficient programming. You sound like you are interested in what some have called the ‘great revolutions,’ because of their major transformations of economic power, social structures, and political changes, especially constitutional changes. Or perhaps you are interested in social revolutions, referring to massive changes in a society’s worldview and technology. Thus for instance the Upper Paleolithic revolution, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the sexual revolution, the biotech revolution, the Accelerando as a confluence of revolutions, the space diaspora, the gender revolution, the longevity revolution, and so on.”

“Indeed. What about success? Can you list necessary and sufficient conditions for a revolution to succeed?”

“Historical events are usually too overdetermined to describe in the causal terminology from logic that you enter into when you use the phrase ‘necessary and sufficient.’ ”

“But try.”

“Historians speak of critical masses of popular frustration, weakened central authority, loss of hegemony—”

“Meaning?”

“ ‘Hegemony’ means one group dominating others without exerting sheer force, something more like a paradigm that creates unnoticed consent to a hierarchy of power. If the paradigm comes to be questioned, especially in situations of material want, loss of hegemony can occur nonlinearly, starting revolutions so rapid there is not time for more than symbolic violence, as in the 1989 velvet, quiet, silk, and singing revolutions.”

“There was a singing revolution?”

“The Baltic states Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania called their 1989 withdrawal from the Soviet Union the singing revolutions, referring to the behavior of the demonstrators in the city plazas. That brings up a point: people in physical masses seem to matter. If enough of the population takes to the streets in mass demonstrations, governments have no good defense. ‘They must dismiss the people and elect another one,’ as Brecht said. That being impossible, they often fall. Or a civil war begins.”

“Surely the literature on revolutions can’t be this superficial,” Swan said. “You’re just quoting random stuff! You have a mind like the rings of Saturn, a million miles wide and an inch deep.”

“Catachresis and antiquated measurement units indicate irony or sarcasm. Coming from you, probably sarcasm—”

“She said sarcastically! You search engine you.”

“A quantum walk is a random walk by definition. Please upgrade my program anytime you feel you can. I’ve heard Wang’s other algorithm is good. Some principles of generalization would be useful.”

“Go on about reasons revolutions happen.”

“People adhere to ideas that explain and offer psychological compensation for their position in the class system of their time. People either increase their sense of dispossession by clarifying it, or they try to dismiss it as unimportant because of an ideology that justifies their dispossession as part of a larger project. People thus very often act against their own interests as the result of ideologies they hold which justify their subalternity to themselves. Denial and hope both play a hand in this. These compensatory ideologies are part of the hegemonic influence over subject peoples in an imperial situation. It happens in all class systems, meaning all cultures in recorded history, since the first agrarian and urban civilizations.”

“They’ve all been class systems?”

“There might have been classless societies before the Neolithic agricultural revolution, but the record makes our understanding of those cultures very speculative. All we can say for sure is that in the post–ice age agricultural revolution, which was one of those more general revolutions that took perhaps a thousand years, a division into classes was institutionalized as a state power apparatus. All over the world, and independent of others, there emerged a four-level division into priests, warriors, artisans, and farmers. Often they were all under the rule of what everyone agreed was a sacred monarch, a king that was also a god. This was very useful for the priest and warrior classes, and for the power of men over women and children.”

“So, never a classless society.”

“Supposedly classless societies have been instituted after certain revolutions, but there are usually leaders in these that quickly form a new ruling class, and the various social roles taken by citizens of the post-revolutionary state revert to classes because of differential value given to different social roles, leading to a new hierarchy being constructed fairly rapidly, usually within five years.”

“So allcultures in history have had class systems.”

“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’sgoing.”

“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 Revolutionis always interesting to ponder.”

“He has numbers?”

“No, but he has a hypothesis. Happiness Quantifiedhas 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 werechess! That’s what I’m after, I guess. If it were chess, what move should I make next?”

“It’s not chess.”