Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [123]
"I have a favor to ask," Lindsay said. "I'm leaving for Czarina-Kluster and would like to take one of the locals with me."
"Someone 'dying into the world?' You always handled that well in Dem-bowska. Certainly."
"No, a youngster."
"Out of the question. A terrible precedent. Wait a moment. Is it Abelard Gomez?"
"The very same."
"I see. That boy troubles me. He has Constantine blood, did you know?
I've been watching the local genetics. Genius turns up in that line like a bad roll of the dice."
"I'm doing you a favor, then."
"I suppose so. Sorry to see you go, Abelard, but with your current ideological cast you're a bad influence. You're a culture hero here, you know."
"I'm through with the old dreams. My energy's back, and there's a new dream loose in Czarina-Kluster. Even if I can't believe it, at least I can help those who do." He stood up, stepping back prudently as the cat inspected his ankles. "Good luck with the mice, Neville."
"You too, Abelard."
Chapter 9
CZARINA-HLUSTER PEOPLE'S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 15-12-'91
The engines of wealth were at full throttle. A torrent of riches was drowning the world. The exponential curves of growth hit with their always deceptive speed, a counterintuitive quickness that stunned the unwary and dazzled the alert.
The circumsolar population stood at 3.2 billion. It had doubled every twenty years and would double again. The four hundred major Mechanist asteroids roiled in a tidal wave of production from an estimated 8 billion self-replicating mining robots and forty thousand full-scale automated factories. The Shaper worlds measured wealth differently, dwarfed by a staggering 20 billion tons of productive biomass.
The primal measurement of Circumsolar Kilobytes soared to an astronomical figure best estimated as 9.45 x 1018. World information, estimating only that available in fully open databanks and not counting the huge empires of restricted data, totalled 2.3 x 1027 bits, the equivalent of 150 full-length books for every star in every galaxy in the visible universe. Stern social measures had to be adopted to keep entire populations from disintegrating in an orgy of plenty.
Megawatts of energy sufficient to run entire Council States were joyfully squandered on high-speed transorbital liners. These spacecraft, large enough to provide every comfort to hundreds of passengers, assumed the dignity of nation-states and suffered their own population booms.
None of these material advances matched the social impact of the progress of the sciences. Breakthroughs in statistical physics proved the objective existence of the four Prigoginic Levels of Complexity and postulated the existence of a fifth. The age of the cosmos was calculated to an accuracy value of plus or minus four years, and rarefied attempts were under way to estimate the "quasi-time" consumed by the precontinuum ur-space. Slower-than-light interstellar travel became physically possible, and five expeditions were launched, manned by star-peering low-mass wireheads. Ultra-long baseline interferometry, beamed from radiotelescopes aboard the wirehead starships, established hard parallaxes for most stars in the Orion Arm of the Galaxy. Examinations of the Perseus and Centaurus Arms showed troubling patches where patterns of stars appeared to have an ominous regularity.
New studies of the galaxies of the Local Supercluster led to refinements in the Hubble Constant. Minor discrepancies caused some visionaries to conclude that the expansion of the universe had been subjected to crude tampering.
Knowledge was power. And in seizing knowledge, humanity had gripped a power as bright and angry as a live wire. At stake were issues vaster than any before: the prospects were more dazzling, the potentials sharper, and the implications more staggering than anything ever faced by humanity or its successors.
Yet the human mind still had its own resources. The gifts for survival were not found only in the sharp perceptions