This is the twenty-first installment of an exploration of
some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of
narrative fiction. Our narrator discovers that the differences between the
Lakeland Republic and his own country include a sharp variance in vulnerability
to sudden political and economic shocks...
***********
The briefing finally wound up a little before one o’clock,
and Stuart Macallan invited all of us to lunch in one of the formal dining rooms
downstairs. I gathered that the ambassadors were having lunch with Meeker in
the president’s private dining room one floor up, but the meal was nothing to
complain about: sandwiches on croissants, French onion soup, pear slices, Brie,
and choice of beverages. You could tell something about each of the diplomats
by watching the latter—the ones who downed strong coffee to deal with too
little sleep, the ones who tipped back a local beer to be social, and the ones
who got something stronger than beer to keep from having to think about just
how bad this mess could get.
I sat with Hank Barker from the Missouri Republic
delegation, and a couple of other people from the trade end of things—Jonathan
Two Hawks, also from Missouri, Vera McTavish from East Canada, and one of the
familiar faces in the room, Lashonda Marvell from the Free City of Chicago—I’d
taken part in rough-draft negotiations on a trade-in-services agreement with
Chicago six years back, and she’d been on the other side of that. Two Hawks and
McTavish were coffee drinkers, Marvell and I ordered beer, and Barker got
bourbon straight, downed it, and then ordered another.
They were all interested in access to the Erie Canal, of
course. It had never really occurred to me how big a resource that was. People in the Atlantic Republic government
treat it as a relic, but with the Mississippi closed to ship traffic by a
shooting war, it had suddenly become the one way around the potential
bottleneck of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. While I wasn’t an official envoy, they
all knew perfectly well that Montrose’s landslide election win meant that the
current embassy staff might not have the same clout in Philadelphia they once
did, and they wanted to make nice with the new team.
I was perfectly willing to play that game, for that matter.
Transit fees on international shipments down the Erie Canal would bring in hard
currency at a time when we could really use that, and if the whole business was
handled right, it would leave the other nations involved owing the Atlantic
Republic favors that could be called in later on. So, between bites of
sandwich, I sketched out the kind of terms we’d want—I modeled them shamelessly
on the draft agreement I’d worked out with the Lakeland Republic, of course—and
they tossed back questions and counteroffers. It was a good lively discussion,
the fun part of trade negotiations, and I think we really made some progress
toward a set of agreements that would be win-win for everybody.
The official Atlantic Republic delegation sat pretty much by
themselves over on the other side of the room, and gave me flat unreadable
looks now and then. They knew perfectly well what I was doing, and what the
people from the other delegations were doing. They were all Barfield’s people,
most of them would be out of a job in January, and since I wasn’t here in an
official capacity, I hadn’t bothered them and they’d returned the favor. Still,
that was before this morning. Once the lunch broke up and people started
heading out, I shook hands with everyone at my table, made sure they had my
contact info back in Philadelphia, and headed over to the handful of Atlantic
people still sitting at theirs.
One of them was a guy I knew from back when I was in
business, and I went up to him and shook his hand. “Hi, Frank.”
“Hi, Peter,” he said. “Hell of a situation.”
“I won’t argue.”
He eyed my clothes, and said, “Gone native, I see.”
I laughed. “When in Rome. I got tired of people looking at
me like a two-headed calf.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” he said. “What can I do for
you?”
“What’s official policy on sending a message to the
President-elect via diplomatic links?”
He gave me a bleak look. “‘All reasonable accommodation,’”
he quoted. “You guys pounded us fair and square, and it’s your baby now.” With
a sudden edged smile: “Frankly, now that this new thing’s blown up, I’m glad
I’ll be out the door in two months.”
“I bet,” I said. We talked about the details, and the upshot
was that the two of us took a taxi to the Atlantic embassy six blocks away on
Lakeland’s Embassy Row. From the outside, it was a nice stone building of
typical Lakeland design, like the other embassies, and the Atlantic flag,
navy-white-navy with a gold anchor in the middle and a gold star in the upper
left, whipped back and forth in a raw wind. Go through the door and
everything’s brushed aluminum and black plastic, with the kind of abstract art
on the walls that looks like an overenthusiastic dog gobbled an artist’s paint
tubes and then threw up. I’d spent most of my adult life in settings like that,
and gotten used to thinking of them as modern, cutting-edge, and so on. For the
first time it really sank in just how incredibly ugly it all was.
Still, I followed Frank to the communications center down in
the basement, got handed over to the comm manager and shown to a desk with a
veescreen terminal. For the first time since I’d crossed the border, I had the
once-familiar sensation of an image field projected into my visual cortex, and
was surprised by how intrusive it felt. Still, I had work to do. I typed out
something to Meg Amberger, the transition team’s trade-policy person, letting
her know about the potential shipping agreements with Missouri, East Canada,
and Chicago, and asked her to tell the boss that the negotiations with Lakeland
had gone well—I figured she could use the good news. I added four words that I
knew Meg wouldn’t understand, but would pass on anyway, and then hit the SEND
button. A moment later that was on its way; I thanked the manager and left the
comm center.
Frank was waiting for me outside the door. “Normally I’d
invite you to come around and check your veemail here, but we’re down to
essential traffic only.”
It took me a moment to realize what he was saying.
“Satellite trouble?”
“Yeah. One more thing on top of everything else we’re having
to deal with.”
I eyed him, considered the options. “Can I buy you a drink?”
He paused, then nodded. “Sure.”
He knew exactly what I was asking, of course. We went
outside again, and he waved down a taxi and gave the driver an address I
recognized, over on the other end of downtown. All the bars and restaurants
close to Embassy Row are wired for sound by somebody or other. If you’re embassy staff or intelligence, you
know where your people have mikes, so you can take contacts there when you want
something recorded, and you usually know where at least some of the other
countries have mikes, so you can feed them true or false information as the
situation requires. If you want to talk off the record, though, you go somewhere
well away from Embassy Row, and never the same place twice, so it’s harder for anybody else’s spooks to try to listen in.
So we rolled through the streets of Toledo behind the
amiable clop-clop-clop of the horse, Frank looking glum and uncomfortable in
his bioplastic suit, me being glad that old-fashioned wool suiting keeps out
the chill. Neither of us said much of anything until we got out of the taxi. We
were in front of the Harbor Club, the place where I’d listened to Sam Capoferro
and his Frogtown Five and talked to Fred Vanich. It was open and surprisingly
busy for three in the afternoon, but we had no trouble getting a table over to
one side, across from the piano Sam had played. A spry old lady with silver
hair and dark brown skin sat there now, playing Chopin with an ease that showed
she’d had her fingers on a keyboard since she was six or so.
The waiter came over as soon as we were settled. I ordered a martini, and Frank gave me a
sidelong look and ordered a double shot of vodka, straight. The bartender
didn’t waste any time, either.
“So,” I said, once the drinks arrived. “Satellite trouble,
and everything else.”
“You know we lease satellite services from a Chinese firm,
right?” Fred took a slug of his drink “We’re supposed to have four high-speed
channels. Right now we’ve got one, and it’s high speed only if you give that
phrase a really broad definition. Rumor has it that at least two embassies have
no realtime comm links home at all, though nobody’s admitting it, and it won’t
many more fender benders in orbit before our provider calls force majeure and
we’re shut out completely. Everybody’s trying to figure out some way to get
satellite service back, but it’s going to be a while.”
“A long while,” I said. “How did embassies phone home before
there were satellites?”
It seemed like an obvious question, but Frank looked at me
as though I’d sprouted a spare head. “I have no idea,” he said. “Who
cares? Anyway, our provider’s trying to
see if there’s a way to get armored satellites out to the Moon’s Lagrange
points or something, but that may be years out.
“But that’s just one more mess on top of the others. You
know the Philly stock market’s down hard.”
“Along with everyone else’s,” I said.
“Worse.” He gestured with his drink, which was getting
toward half empty. “We had a lot more
foreign investment than anybody realized—it was all through shell corporations,
you know the drill—and when telecom stocks started dragging the market down, you
had the usual flight to safety. The Department of Finance stepped in, of
course, and propped things up with hard currency loans, but they’ve only got so
much on hand and the World Bank isn’t handing over any more. So even before
this damn war broke out, we were looking at a major economic crisis—and now
this. I honestly don’t know how we’re going to make it.”
“We’ve had economic crises before,” I said.
“It’s different this time. Finance is running in circles
like a bunch of robot tanks with a defective program, and everybody else is
trying to get as much money out of the markets as they can without making too
much noise, and when the hard currency runs short the bottom’s going to drop
right out. I hope your boss has something up her sleeve, or we’re going to be
in for it.”
I motioned for him to go on, and he said, “And now the war.
This stays off the record.” I nodded, and he went on. “Our NIS people here
talked with their opposite numbers back home.” NIS was National Intelligence
Service, our spook shop in Philadelphia. “They’ve got sources down south. Word
is that along with the drilling platforms, at least eighteen Confederate
production platforms got blown to scrap, and fourteen of them were running
stripper well farms.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that there’s not enough output to pay for replacing
the platforms once the fighting’s over. A lot of the Gulf oil industry works
legacy fields, right? If the situation’s similar on the Texas side, and that’s
the current best guess, a big fraction of Gulf oil production is g, o, n, e, gone, for good. That means another price
spike, and maybe worse.” He gave me an uneasy look; I gestured for him to
continue, and he said, “Actual shortages. As in ‘No, we don’t have any at all’
shortages. How do you deal with something like that?”
“There’ve been oil shortages before,” I reminded him. “How
did people deal with those?”
“I don’t have the least idea,” he said. “That was then, this
is now. But the people back in Philly
are just aghast. They’re trying to game possible responses and coming up blank.
I don’t know if there’s any option that will work at all.” He finished his
drink, waved down a waiter and ordered a refill.
I nodded and said something to keep him talking, and for the
next two hours or so got an increasingly detailed account of just how screwed the
Atlantic Republic was going to be without viable satellite services, economic
stability, or a reliable source of petroleum—we used less of that latter than
most of the other North American republics, and a lot less than anybody thought
of using back before the Second Civil War, but it was still something we
couldn’t give up without landing in a world of hurt. All the while, though, I
was trying to fit my head around the way he’d blown off my questions.
The penny didn’t drop until I got him onto a taxi—he was
pretty wobbly by then, so I paid his fare and told the driver where to take
him—and stood there on the sidewalk watching the back of the thing pull away.
Two weeks ago, I realized, I’d have done exactly the same thing. That was then,
this is now, it’s different this time, that’s history, we need to be thinking
ahead of the times, not behind them: how many times had I mouthed those same
catchphrases?
I’d meant to flag down another cab, but turned and started
walking instead taking the distant pale shape of the unfinished Capitol dome as
my guide. Around me, Toledo went about its business as though this was just
another day. The sky had cleared off, the wind was brisk but not too raw, and
people were out on the sidewalks, shopping or heading for swing shift jobs or
just taking in some fresh air. The crisis that had the Atlantic Republic
tottering was just another piece of news to them. It was interesting news; a
paperboy came trotting along the street shouting “Extra! Latest news on the war
down south!” and found plety of customers. Still, they didn’t have to
care. It wasn’t something that was going
to throw them out of work and shred the fabric of their daily lives. And the
reason was—
The reason was that they had stopped saying “It’s different
this time,” and treated the past as a resource rather than an irrelevance.
I kept walking. Everything I saw around me—the horsedrawn
cabs, the streetcars, the comfortable and attractive brick buildings, the
clothing on the people—had been quarried out of the past and refitted for use
in the present, because they worked better than the alternatives. The insight
that had come crashing into my thoughts in the middle of Parsifal
returned: for us, for people in the North American republics and elsewhere in
the industrial world, the period of exploration was over, the period of
performance had arrived, and we had plenty of data about what worked and what
didn’t, if only we chose to use it.
A streetcar went by, packed with workers on their way home
from the day shift; the conductor’s bell went ding-di-ding ding, the way
conductors’ bells went on those same streets a hundred and fifty years before.
I knew perfectly well why nobody in Philadelphia had considered putting
streetcars back on the streets of the Atlantic Republic’s cities, to do a job
they did better, and for much less money, than the shiny high-tech modern
equivalents. I’d been in the middle of the groupthink that made progress look
like the only option even when progress was half a century into negative returns. Everyone I knew was well aware that “newer”
had stopped meaning “better” a long time ago, that every upgrade meant more
problems and fewer benefits, that the latest must-have technologies did less
and cost more than the last round, but nobody seemed to be able to draw the
obvious conclusion.
I shook my head and kept walking, while those ideas circled
in my head.
It must have been most of an hour later when I realized I’d
overshot my hotel by a good six blocks.
The Capitol dome was something like a dozen blocks behind me, and I’d
strayed into an upscale neighborhood of row houses with little shops at the
street corners. I turned around, headed back toward the dome. By the time I got
there, it must have been past five o’clock, and people were trickling out of
the Capitol entrance, heading toward the street and the line of cabs that
waited there for fares. I recognized one of them at a glance; fortunately, she
saw me and turned up the sidewalk to meet me.
“Hello, Melanie,” I said.
That got a tired smile. “Hello, Peter. Hell of a day.”
“I won’t argue.” I considered the options. “Up for dinner?”
“About that.”
I gestured to one of the cabs; she smiled again, and the cabby bounded down from his seat and opened the door for us.
**************
In other fiction-related news, I'm pleased to announce that Founders House, the publishing firm of the After Oil anthologies, is launching a new magazine of science fiction and fantasy, titled Mythic. They're soliciting stories for the first issue right now. Publisher Shaun Kilgore is looking for science fiction and fantasy that moves past the stereotypes of the genre -- science fiction that isn't all about spaceships and rayguns, and fantasy that isn't infested with dragons and elves -- and he's indicated to me that submissions of deindustrial SF will be welcome. Check out the website here.
