As it happened, there came a later period when the vagaries of plate tectonics thrust up two huge mountain ranges — the Himalayas and the Rockies — which virtually
blocked the flow of low, moist air across the Northern Hemisphere. This had dramatic consequences on the weather, which in turn isolated still more species, driving them to adapt.
Ebbing, flowing. Inhaling, exhaling. The cycle kept driving changes, improvements.
Eventually, dim flickers of light began to glow on the planet’s night side, flickers in the dark that weren’t forest fires or lightning.
All this heating and cooling, stirring and recombining had finally brought about something completely new.
□ Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [□ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546], Special Subforum 562: Crackpot-Iconoclast Social Theories.
All this panic about how the Han are engaged in “economic conquest of the globe” — such rubbish! True, their huge, surging economy poses a challenge, especially to the PAN and GEACS trade groups. Instead of endlessly debating the University of Winnipeg Neomanagement Model, China has actually instituted many of its revolutionary features. We can all learn a lesson, especially the Sovs and Canucks, who keep finding themselves underpriced in the manufacture of desal equipment and nanocrystals. The Han already have a corner on blazers and lap-ticks, not to mention consumer items like torque zenners. But talk of “economic conquest” [□ ref: A69802-111, 5/19/38 K-234-09-17826] or the Han “… buying up goddam everything…” [□ ref: A69802-111, 5/12/38 M-453-65-5545] completely ignores history.
Consider the 1950s and 1960s. The United States of America, which then included California and Hawaii, but not Luzon or Cuba, was the world’s economic powerhouse. A famous Euroleader named Servan-Schreiber wrote a book called The American Challenge, predicting America would soon “… own everything worth owning…”
Of course it didn’t happen. Having achieved success, U.S. citizens demanded payoff for all their hard work. Instead of buying the world, they bought things from the world. It became the greatest transfer of wealth in history — far surpassing all forms of foreign aid. The American purchasing dynamo lifted Europe and East Asia into the twenty-first century… until the bubble finally burst and Yanks had to learn to pay as you go, like normal people.
For a brief time in the nineteen-seventies, the first and second oil crises made it seem that the new planetary kingpins would be Arab sheiks. Then, in the eighties, Japan scared the hell out of everybody. (Look it up!) Through hard work (and by adroitly catering to America’s adolescent buying frenzy) the Japanese boot-strapped themselves to economic power that held the world in awe. Everyone predicted that soon they “would own everything.”
But each of us takes our turn, it seems, driving the world economy. A new generation of Japanese, wanting more from life than endless toil and a tiny apartment, went on a new buying spree. And in the early years of this century, wasn’t it Russia — with nearly half the world’s trained engineers and newly released from two thousand years of stifling czars and commissars — who were suddenly only too glad to work hard, build to order, and sell cheap whatever the Japanese wanted? Many of you probably remember the consequence a while later, when Russian was proposed to replace Simglish as the second lingua franca. But that passed too, didn’t it?
Come on, droogs. Learn to step back and take a long view. Time will come (if the planet holds out) when even the Han will get tired of laboring themselves sick, piling money in the bank with nothing to spend it on.
Then cafe to predict where the next group of hard workers will arise? My money’s on those puritan secessionists in New England. Now those are people who know how to give an employer a good hour’s work for an hour’s wage…
• CRUST
No one congratulated Crat for saving his drowning crewmate. Nobody spoke much about the incident at all. Things happen, was the philosophy. So there were a few more widows back on one of the floating towns? Too bad. Life was short; what more could you say? Still, Crat apparently wasn’t a “go-suck Yankee sof-boy” anymore. There were no more sour looks at mess, or strange objects found swimming in his gruel. Silently, they moved his hammock out of the steamy hold and up to the anchor room with the others.
Only one fellow actually commented on the misadventure with the fishing net. “Jeez, Vato,” he told Crat. “I never seen no bugger hold breath so long as you!”
To Crat, who had no idea how long he’d been underwater, the remark seemed like a signal from Providence. An experience that might have turned some men away from swimming forever, instead pointed him to an unexpected talent.
The story of his life had been mediocre plainness at best, and all too often less than that. His image of himself was slow and thick as a stone. The thought of having any unusual abilities astonished Crat. And so, at the very moment he had won acceptance aboard the Congo, he renewed his vow to leave first chance — to act on his earlier loose talk about going into salvage.
Not that there was much he’d miss about this old tub. Life on a frontier didn’t offer many luxuries. Forced to live here for a week, the average American would never again complain about his own restricted water ration, which in some states topped a lavish hundred gallons a week.
Or take another necessity — Data-Net privileges. Here you simply didn’t have them.
Crat used to despise old folks back in Indiana for relying on so many electronic crutches… globe-spanning access to news on every topic, to every library, to every dumpit research journal even, instantly translated from any obscure language for mere pennies. Then there were the hobby lines, special interest groups, net-zines, three-vee shows.
Until emigrating, Crat never realized how much he depended on all that, too. Aboard Congo, though, they had this strange, once-a-day ritual — mail call. Each man answered if his name was shouted, and swapped a black cube with the bosun. You were allowed to pipe two message blips, no more than fifty words each, through the ship’s single antenna, ruled dictatorially by the comm officer, a one-eyed, one-legged victim of some past oceanic catastrophe, whom everybody, even the captain, treated with utter deference.
Standing in line, waiting humbly for your miserable blips, was almost as humiliating as evening vitamin call, when a bored U.N. nurse doled each man his pressed capsule of “Nutritional Aid” — the sum total of the world’s sense of obligation to the pariah state of refugees. No wonder the great powers were even less generous with the world’s true lifeblood, information.
Now and then, during mail call, Crat caught himself wondering why Remi and Roland never wrote to him. Then he remembered with a sudden jerk. They’re dead. I’m the last. Last of the Quayle High Settlers.
Strange. Believing he was destined for a short life, Crat had long ago decided to live one with no compromises. He’d always been the one getting into jams, which his friends always reliably, sensibly got him out of.