This is the sixth installment of an exploration of some of
the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative
fiction. Our narrator, roaming the streets of the capitol of the Lakeland
Republic, visits a newsstand and a public library, and discovers that
information and knowledge are two different things...
***********
I swung past my hotel, dropped off the shopping bag with my
bioplastic clothes, and went back out onto Toledo’s streets. That makes it
sound easier than it was; some kind of event—a wedding reception, I guessed
from the decor—was getting started in one of the second floor ballrooms, and
the lobby and the sidewalk outside were both crammed with people in formal wear
heading in. It took some maneuvering to get through it all, but after not too
many minutes I was strolling up an uncrowded sidewalk toward the unfinished
white dome of the Capitol.
The Legislative Building back home in Philadelphia doesn’t
have a dome. It’s an angular blob of glass and metal, designed by I forget
which hotshot European architectural firm, and when it opened twenty-two years
ago you could hardly access the metanet at all without being barraged by oohs
and ahs about how exciting, innovative, and futuristic it was. You don’t hear
much of that any more. They’ve spent
twenty-two years now trying to get the roof to stop leaking and coming up with
workarounds for all the innovative features that didn’t turn out to work too
well, and the design looks embarrassingly dated these days, the way avant-garde
architecture always does a couple of decades down the road. I was curious to
see what the Lakeland Republic had done instead.
It took two blocks to get to a place where I had a clear
view of the building, and when I did, I wasn’t in for any particular surprise.
They’d modeled it on state capitol buildings in the old Union, with a tall
white dome in the center above the rotunda and the big formal entrance, with a
wing for each house of the legislature on either side. The Lakeland Republic
flag—blue above and green below, with a circle of seven gold stars for the
seven states that joined together at Partition—fluttered from a flagpole out
front. Long rows of windows on each wing showed that there was plenty of room
for offices and meeting rooms along with the legislative chambers. The walls
were white marble with classical decor, and the peaked roofs to either side of
the dome didn’t look as though they were likely to leak much. I thought about
what the banker had said about history, and kept going.
Another block brought me to an open storefront with a big
gaudy handpainted sign above it yelling KAUFER’S NEWS in big red letters. Down
below were more newspapers and magazines—the kind that are printed on
paper—than I’d ever seen in one place. I remembered what Melanie Berger had
said about newspapers, and decided to check it out.
Inside, magazines lined the three walls and newspapers
filled a big island unit in the middle. Signs with bright red lettering on the
island unit gave me some guidance: one yelled TOLEDO PAPERS, another LR PAPERS,
and a third FOREIGN PAPERS. That narrowed it down a bit, but there were still
fifteen different newspapers in the Toledo section.
The proprietor was sitting on a tall stool next to the
entrance. She was a scruffy-looking woman in her thirties with blonde hair
spilling out from under a floppy cap, wearing an apron with KAUFER’S NEWS
printed on it that had seen many better days. By the time I turned toward her,
she’d already unfolded herself from the stool and came over. “Can I help you?”
“Please,” I said. “I’m new in town and I don’t know the
local papers.”
“No problem.” She pointed to the stacked newspapers. “The Blade
and the Journal are the two dailies—the Blade’s the paper of
record, the Journal’s the community paper and a lot more lively. The
rest of ‘em are weeklies—neighborhood, ethnic, religious, what have you. The Blade’s
a buck twenty-five, the Journal’s seventy-five cents, the others are
twenty-five, except for the Wholly Toledo—that’s the arts and nightlife
rag and doesn’t cost a thing.”
It’s always amused me that everywhere in the former United
States, the basic unit of the local currency is still called a buck—that’s true
even in California, where what trade goes on around the edges of the civil war
is mostly in Chinese currency when it isn’t just barter. I pulled out a couple
of Lakeland bills, and got that day’s Toledo Blade and the latest Wholly
Toledo. “Thanks,” I said.
“Sure thing.” She turned to another customer who had a
magazine open. “You want to read that, Mac, you gotta buy it. This ain’t the
library, you know.”
The other guy looked sheepish, closed the magazine, paid for
it and left the newsstand. “Speaking of which,” I said, “how do I get to the
library from here?”
“Two blocks that way, hang a left, three blocks straight
ahead and you’re there.”
I thanked her again, tipped her one of the quarters she’d
given me in change, and left.
The library wasn’t first on my list, though. The Blade
had a couple of articles on the front page I wanted to read. The wind was
picking up, so the idea of plopping down on one of the park benches out in
front of the Capitol didn’t particularly appeal; the question in my mind was
where indoors I could sit down and read the thing. As it happened, I’d gone
less than a block when I passed a little hole-in-the-wall café, and in the window seat
was an old brown-skinned woman in a heavy wool coat with a cup of coffee in her
hand and a copy of the Journal open in front of her. I took the hint,
ducked inside, and a couple of minutes later was perched on a slightly rickety
chair with a cup of coffee and the front page of the Blade to keep me
company.
The lead article was on the political crisis that had blown
up that morning. I’d guessed that the paper would have more details than you’d
find in the 140-character stories you get from most metanet news sites, and I
was right; for that matter, it had more detail than what you saw on the old
internet, back in the day. I’d seen classified
briefing papers on political issues that didn’t cover as much ground. By the
time I’d finished the first paragraph I knew the basics—the group that was
threatening to bolt out of Meeker’s coalition was the Social Alternative party,
and the issue was whether lowering the tariff on three industrial metals
counted as a government subsidy for technology—but the rest of the story, part
of it on the front page and part of it back in the middle of the first section,
filled in the details: who was backing the tariff reduction, who was opposing
it, what the various arguments were, what the upper house of the legislature
and the justices of the Constitutional Court had to say, and so on. By the time
I’d finished reading it I had a pretty fair snapshot of the way politics worked
in the Republic.
The other article that caught my eye was a follow-up piece
on the destruction of the Progresso IV satellite a week before. That was
news, and not just for spaceheads, since it was the first satellite to get
taken out by orbital junk in a midrange orbit, and it was big enough that its
fragments could turn into a real problem for other satellites in that range.
The article quoted the head of the Brazilian space agency and an assortment of
experts, with opinions ranging from sanguine to sobering. None of the facts
were new to me—I’d been following the satellite situation since my first stint
in government a dozen years back—but the story put it all into context
effortlessly in a page and a half of newsprint, all the way from the first
warnings back in the 1970s, through the slow motion Kessler-syndrome disaster
that got going in low earth orbit in 2029, to the increasing pace of satellite
failures in geosynchronous orbits in the last half dozen years. Since the
2030s, I knew, the midrange orbits had gotten pretty crowded; the last thing
anybody needed was a Kessler syndrome there, too.
I got a refill of my coffee, flipped through the rest of the
paper. The business section was going to take careful study, I saw that at a
glance. Some of it was pretty
straightforward—several counties issuing bonds, commodity prices in the Chicago
exchange veering this way and that, and two full pages that looked like
ordinary stock market data, except that I didn’t know any of the companies that
were listed—but some of it was right out there in left field. The one that
stuck in my mind was a corporation that was being wound up: not going bankrupt,
being bought, or any of the other ways that corporations die back home, but
winding up its affairs, distributing its remaining assets, and closing its
doors. I shook my head, kept reading. The sports section seemed pretty much
normal, except that I didn’t know any of the teams and there were a lot of
them, enough that I wondered whether every middle-sized town in the Lakeland
Republic had its very own. The arts and entertainment section in back had
everything from concerts to theater listings to a page of radio programs. I
nodded, slid the paper into one of the big outside patch pockets of my raincoat,
paid my tab and headed out into the fading afternoon light.
The library was easy enough to find. It was a big two-story
brick building with arched windows and a wide porch over the entrance, and a
couple of cloth banners out front with CAPITOL BRANCH—TOLEDO PUBLIC LIBRARY on
them. The lobby was spacious, with a bulletin board full of flyers. To the
left, the door was propped open, and I heard a woman’s voice telling some kind
of story about a mole and a water rat; a glance upward met the sign saying CHILDREN’S
ROOM. I turned right, and went through the door into what I hoped was the adult
section.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that I’d guessed right,
even though it didn’t look like any library I’d ever seen. Instead of rows of
long bare tables studded with keyboards and screens, it had shelves upon
shelves upon shelves of printed books, more of them than I think I’d ever seen
in one place before. Tables and chairs clustered in the middle of the room,
with people sitting bent over books, and over toward the windows were a few
sofas and overstuffed chairs with their own contingent of readers. Heavy carpet
covered the floor and a historical mural covered the vaulted ceiling, spanning
the distance from the native tribes on one end to a half-built Capitol on the
other.
I really had no idea what to make of it all. In place of the
clatter of keys and the babble of voices that gave the libraries I knew their
soundtrack, the room was as hushed as a funeral parlor. I watched one of the
patrons go up to the big desk where the librarians stood to ask a question, and
the conversation that followed took place in murmurs. Lacking anything better
to do, I crossed the room to the shelves of books. There was some kind of
numerical code on the spines of the books, which didn’t tell me much of
anything, but from the titles I figured out quickly enough that numbers in the
low three hundreds, or at least these numbers, had to do with politics. I
pulled out a couple of books, glanced at them, and was about to go to another
shelf when I spotted a slim volume titled Changing Tiers.
I pulled the book out, opened it, and found that it was
exactly what I’d guessed, a guide for Lakelanders who were moving from one
county to another at a different tier. I paged through it for a few minutes,
decided that I needed to read it, and went looking for a free chair.
I realized pretty quickly that I’d found the book I needed,
because it started out with a chapter on the history of the tier system, and
that gave me the key to the whole arrangement. During the Second Civil War, the
book explained, the states that became the Lakeland Republic got pounded most
of the way back to the Stone Age by Federal airstrikes and two years of
town-by-town fighting. When Washington finally fell and the fighting ended,
nearly every bit of infrastructure in those states—roads, railways, power
grids, water and sewer systems, you name it—was in ruins, and once Partition
and the beginning of the debt crisis put paid to the last hope of a fast
recovery, Lakelanders had to figure out how to rebuild and how to pay for it.
The differences of opinion were drastic enough, and funds and other resources
short enough, that the provisional government decided to make each county
responsible for deciding what kind of infrastructure it wanted, and taxing
itself to pay the costs.
From that beginning, over a decade or so of contentious
local decisions and gradual rebuilding, the tier system evolved. A second
chapter sketched out the legal framework—certain clauses in the constitution
and its amendments, two important decisions by the Constitutional Court, and
the laws that regulated what counties could and couldn’t do, and what they
could and couldn’t enforce. It was all very clear, and I got out my notebook
and filled most of four pages with notes. More to the point, I ended up with
some sense of the logic of the tier system and the reasons why it made sense to
Lakelanders.
By the time I’d finished those two chapters the last
daylight was gone and the window in front of me looked out on a night scene lit
by streetlamps and occasional windows. I decided not to read the rest of the
book, put it back in its place on the shelves, and headed out into the cold
wind.
I don’t get lost easily, or I’d probably have ended up
wandering off in some random direction until I could find a cab or something.
As it was, I wasn’t sure of my bearings until I got within sight of the
Capitol. The sidewalks were anything but deserted—I gathered that Toledo had a
lively nightlife scene—but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the people I
passed just then. I was thinking about the book I’d read and the newspaper in
my pocket, and the difference between the fragmentary bits of information I was
used to getting off short squibs on the metanet and the knowledge-in-context
I’d gathered from the longer, more context-rich pieces I’d just taken in. It
was a sobering comparison. I decided I’d have to check out Lakeland schools and
colleges, and see if the difference applied there as well.
When I got to the hotel where I was staying, though, I had
to pay attention, because there was no way in; the crowd from the wedding
reception was out in front, lining a narrow path from the door to the edge of
the sidewalk, where an ornate horsedrawn carriage waited. I didn’t have too
much trouble figuring out what was about to happen, so I stood there on the
outer edge of the crowd, waiting for the happy couple. Some of the guests had
taken the time to put on coats and hats before heading out into the night air,
and I blended in well enough that a young woman pushing her way through the
crowd handed me a little bag of rice to throw. I took it, amused, and waited
with the rest.
A few minutes later, the guests of honor came out—two young men in their early twenties, laughing
and holding hands and obviously very much in love. I pelted them with rice
along with everyone else, and stood there while they climbed into the carriage
and waved. The driver snapped his reins and the horses broke into a smart trot;
the usual cheering and waving followed, and away they went.
The crowd began to scatter. I turned toward the door and
found myself facing the pianist who’d been playing in the hotel restaurant
during lunch that same day. Of course he didn’t know me from George
Washington’s off ox; he turned to go back inside, and since that was the way I
was headed, too, I followed him. The lobby wasn’t too bad, but the stair was a
river of people headed for the doors, and so the pianist and I ended up
standing next to each other at the foot of the stair, waiting for the crowd to
pass by and let us through.
“That was pretty good jazz you were playing,” I said to him,
“here at lunchtime.”
He gave me a startled look. “Thank you!” Then: “You’re one
of Sandy’s political friends?”
“No, just staying here at the hotel.” He nodded, and I went
on. “You play anywhere else?”
“Yeah, this is just my day gig. Friday and Saturday nights
I’m at the Harbor Club downtown.” He reached into his jacket, pulled out a
little rectangle of stiff paper and handed it to me. I realized after a blank
moment that it was an old-fashioned business card. Fancy script spelled out:
Sam Capoferro
and his Frogtown
Five
Down below in little print was contact info.
“Show that at the door and there’s no cover charge,” he told
me. “See you there sometime.”
A gap opened up in the crowd, and he headed up the stair. I pocketed the business card and waited for another opening.
