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By Root 2495 0

come after democracy per se, Charlotte’s postulated period of utopian “harmony.” These glimmerings were faint, and Charlotte’s distant hoped-for system a vague hypothesis; when Sax Russell read the later volumes of her work, poring avidly over the endless examples and arguments (for this account is a severe abridgment of her work, a mere abstract only), reading in an excited state at finding a general paradigm that might clarify history for him at last, he wondered if this putative age of universal harmony and goodwill would ever actually come about; it seemed to him possible or even likely that there was some sort of asymptotic curve in the human story— the ballast of the body, perhaps— which would keep civilization struggling there in the age of democracy, struggling always upward, also away from relapse, and never getting much further along; but it also seemed to him that this state itself would be good enough to call a successful civilization. Enough was as good as a feast, after all.

In any case, Charlotte’s metahistory was very influential, providing for the explosively accelerating diaspora a kind of master narrative, by which they could orient themselves; and so she joined the small list of historians whose analyses had affected the flow of their own time, people like Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Gibbon, Chamfort, Carlyle, Emerson, Marx, Spengler— and on Mars before Charlotte, Michel Duval. People now ordinarily understood capitalism to have been the clash of feudalism and democracy, and the present to be the democratic age, the clash of capitalism and harmony. And they also understood that their own era could still become anything else as well— Charlotte was insistent that there was no such thing as historical determinism, but only people’s repeated efforts to enact their hopes; then the analyst’s retroactive recognition of such hopes as came true created an illusion of determinism. Anything could have happened; they could have fallen apart into general anarchy, they could have become a universal police state to “control” the crisis years; but as the great metanationals of Terra had in reality all mutated into Praxis-like worker-owned cooperatives, with people in control of their own work— democracy it was, for the moment. They had enacted that hope.

And now their democratic civilization was accomplishing something that the previous system could never have accomplished, which was simply survival in the hypermalthusian period. Now they could begin to see that fundamental shift in systems, in this twenty-second century they were enacting; they had shifted the balance, in order to survive the new conditions. In the cooperative democratic economy, everyone saw the stakes were high; everyone felt responsible for their collective fate; and everyone benefited from the frenetic burst of coordinated construction that was going on everywhere in the solar system.

This flowering civilization included not only the solar system beyond Mars, but the inner planets as well. In the flush of energy and confidence humanity was working back in to areas previously considered uninhabitable, and now Venus was attracting a crowd of new terraformers, who were following up on the gesture made by Sax Russell with the relocation of Mars’s great mirrors, and had elaborated a grand vision for the eventual inhabitation of that planet, the sister to Earth in so many ways.

And even Mercury had its settlement. Although it had to be admitted that for most purposes, Mercury was too close to the sun. Its day lasted fifty-nine Terran days, its year eighty-eight Terran days, so that three of its days equaled two years, a pattern that was not a coincidence but a node on the way to being tidally locked, like Luna around the Earth. The combination of these two spins gave Mercury a very slow roll through its solar day, during which the brightside hemisphere became much too hot, while the nightside hemisphere became extremely cold. The lone city currently on the planet was therefore a kind of enormous train, running around the planet on tracks set on the northern