“Right. And it creates cultural friction. The workingmen can sleep in the tropics on warm nights and commute to the arctic where the mines and aquaculture rigs are during the day. Meanwhile the Australians (who now live in the middle of the Great Victoria Gardenlands) don’t want floods of travelers to overturn their few remaining Democratic institutions. The Chinese (who now live in the midst of the Gobi Gardenlands) don’t want floods of travelers overturning their few remaining Confucian institutions.”
“What about the other countries?”
“Bridesmaids. They just follow after the buttocks of one of these brides or the other, holding their trains. India and Iberia, even South Africa and her millions of automated factories, are nothing more than flower girls in this century.”
“You got marrying on the brain, pal. So what’s the second problem?”
“The second is a problem of economics. It’s the same as happened to Spain when the Spanish Empire flooded itself with gold and silver from the New World, mined from the Andes or robbed from the Aztecs. Drove down the price of gold and drove up the price of goods. In this case, the Hermetic came back with contraterrene carbon around 1020 kg—my guess, based on ship performance values.”
Montrose nodded. It was a chunk the size of the Ceres asteroid, and represented the tally of both all the decades of Hermetic star-lifting, and of the decades of Croesus. “Endless wealth. Energy enough to do anything.”
“And what did happen to Spain? She did not invest the money. The Dons used it to buy Arabian stallions and fancy mansions and saddles with silver folderol, and the King of Spain used it to build an Armada. The gold flowed out of Spain to manufacturers in Italy, France, and England. Eventually the price stabilized at a higher level. Spain went broke. The richest country in Europe went broke. Because Spain did not use the wealth to get more wealth.”
“Pox, I hear they melt Antarctica and somehow get the winds to carry all the vapor up to rain in the Gobi Desert, or the Great Victoria Desert in Australia. Earth ain’t broke.”
“You measure bankruptcy by comparing your income to your liabilities. In this case, one of your liabilities, one of your costs, is the cost of mounting a Third Expedition to the Diamond Star, and the return-on-investment time is one hundred years. If you are going to travel even to nearby stars, you have to start thinking on those time scales.”
“Power won’t run out for a hundred years. Blackie knows that.”
“Even so, there are world leaders who are alert enough to think in those time scales. The power might last a century, but even now the globe knows it cannot maintain a free-energy regime. The world, now that it is addicted to free energy, has to be switched to a rationed-energy regime. The question is, when does the switch come? And who does the rationing?”
Cyrano showed him a simple but chilling set of propositions from game-theory. The decision of two prisoners both accused of a crime, when clemency was offered to whomever would first rat out the other, either to trust each other and remain silent or to betray each other was described with a few gamelike rules: if they both trusted, both would break even; if both betrayed, both lost; if one trusted and the other betrayed, the betrayer would win big.
It could be shown mathematically that the winning strategy in a game of repeated moves was to betray only in retaliation to betrayal, and otherwise to trust. But when there was a time limit, a final move, both players had a powerful incentive to betray, because the final move was one that by definition invited no possible retaliation. But each player, knowing the other was under an incentive to betray him on the final move, therefore had an incentive to betray on the penultimate move. Likewise, each player, knowing the other was under an incentive to betray him on the penultimate move, therefore had an incentive to betray on the antepenultimate move; and so on.
This remorseless logic operated for any game of a known and finite number of moves, even if the number of moves was immense.
In this case, even if the switch from a free-energy regime to a rationed-energy regime was not to happen for a hundred years, the incentive to betray future potential rivals before they became rivals operated now.
Montrose was not convinced. “When the switch does come, the free market will adjust. The price goes up as the goods get scarce. So then they go back to burning wood, coal, and oil, like God intended. Big deal.”
“And they go back to the barter system.”
“What?”
“Snow grams edged out other currencies as the store of value. They use certificates representing measured masses of anticarbon for their money.”
Montrose checked the graphs, and checked the math behind them. “So the money gets expensive, too, and the interest rate goes up. Big deal. Why should that cause a war?”
“Because politics is not driven by free-market rules. Your mother, Mrs. Montrose, told you what rules drive politics. Phobos, doxa, and kerdos. Fear, fame, and gain. I’ll rephrase the question. Both the deserts in China and the deserts in Australia have been turned, by a ridiculous and profligate public works project, into farmlands and fruit-tree groves. Now imagine you are one of them. The newly-fertile croplands opened an internal frontier, allowing both for wages to rise and population. As this century’s breadbasket, you have political clout and world attention, because you control the food supply. Sure, there might be more contraterrene coming in one hundred years, but there might be a delay. Watering the desert is not something you can just turn on again after you turn it off. Five years, or three, or one, is too great a hiatus. If the greenery dies, it will stay dead, and the desert ecology will re-assert itself. The land will no longer support the population figures you currently enjoy. You are China. Australia is your hated rival. Or vice versa. What do you do? You cannot keep melting the glaciers to water the deserts if you run out of antimatter. You have to make sure the antimatter that they might get years from now for their irrigation will come to you instead.”
“Make sure how? By war? Blackie won’t let a war erupt. He can just shoot whoever shoots first, and so no one will dare shoot first. He’s got contraterrene weapons. He’s the only one who does. It is a self-contained system.”
“Spoken like an engineer! But this problem is not an engineering problem. It is political and economic. And the free market cannot adjust. Antimatter is a non-market good, since Blackie has been giving at away free of cost for political gain. He cannot let the price go up.”
“So Blackie rations it.”
“Which means, that in the rivalry between China and Australia, whichever faction has more influence over Del Azarchel will use the world-government and the energy market to destroy the other by lawful means; and when the other has nothing to lose, it will embrace unlawful means, and go to war. Del Azarchel picks the winner. At that point, Del Azarchel opens the fiery gates of heaven, and bombards the loser from space.”
“You saying he can’t maintain control without killing thousands and millions of folk?”
Cyrano pointed at the sudden jag in the graph. “Maybe if Del Azarchel did not interfere, and he let the cost of contraterrene rise—then speculators anticipating the coming lean years would buy up shares now, and this would force other uses to economize. Maybe then we can avoid the coming war. China and Australia could maintain as much cropland as they could afford, and there is not one winner and one loser. It is still a delicate compromise, but it could be done.”
“He must see these same equations. If it can be done, why hasn’t he done it?”
“Because Del Azarchel would be undermining his own authority. The monopoly of the World Power Syndicate would have to be dissolved. Many ships, some in private hands, and not just the Hermetic, would have to be allowed to range the strategic high ground of outer space, or otherwise ownership on paper of antimatter grams in transplutonian orbit is meaningless. That has military implications. Del Azarchel would have to step aside as political leader, because otherwise no investor would believe he would keep his hands to himself, and not simply undo what the market did. Basically, he would have to abdicate, and let the Princess solve the problem.”