There were improvements, of course. Most of these were minor. Compared with the changes that occurred between 1850 and 1950, most of those from 1950 to 2042 were trivial. The earlier century had seen the coming of electricity, of automobiles and highways, of radio, of television, of airplanes and rockets, of drugs that worked miracles — of flush toilets and telephones and movies and who knew what else. The list was endless. The first decades of the next century saw one really significant change: the introduction of the computer and other microelectronic devices. Then the pace slowed. During the next fifty years or so there were better fuels, a few dandy medicines, more efficient guns and space hardware, cars with more gizmos, pop with more bubbly, longer-lasting sugarless chewing gum, more elaborate video games, and louder ear-blasters for the “Banger” music freaks. But very little that was radical. Very little that was important.
The comparison wasn’t even close. Why? The think-tankers denied that humanity had invented all that could be invented: much more could be done, they said, provided “development” was there — and provided the Powers That Be lei change occur.
That last was the kicker.
Change usually meant loss of control, loss of money, loss of entrenched investments. Those were the things that sent empires reeling. Invent something basic — cheap synthetic fuel, for example — and watch the economic and political order go clattering down like a Japanese domino exhibition! Reform one minor tax, end a program, close one bureau, and see the lobbyists scurry to the rescue! The Powers did not want — could not permit — adventurism. Important, far-reaching technical, political, and cultural changes were out.
Brave, new world? Hell, Wrench insisted — and Lessing reluctantly agreed — that it wasn’t even a very brave old one: too chick-enshit to get its act together and do anything about anything! Sides, lobbies, interests, propagandists, voices big and small, multiplied into an uproar of opinion, demand, and contradictory advice that outdid the Tower of Babel by umpty-ump million decibels! Change, you say? Develop? Reform? Not likely! Not with everybody pulling this way and that, from Big Oil and Big Steel to the Lesbian Dirt-bikers for Jesus!
Politically the maps hadn’t changed very much since the beginning of the twenty-first century, which kept the map makers poor but pleased the Establishment. Russia and the United States, after a brief rapprochement in the 1990s, now glared at each other again across various international chessboards, and everybody else waited breathlessly on the outskirts like kids watching two gang leaders about to duke it out in the locker room. So the West put up satellites with more sophisticated computers? The Soviets immediately followed suit with smart bombs that travelled underwater, then emerged and flew for short distances to smash land installations. The Chinese, the Brazilians, the Indonesians, the Indians, the Israelis, and everybody else with a dime’s worth of technology strove to copy as best they could. It was an endless race, a “keeping up with the Joneses,” that was both unwinnable and utterly wasteful of the planet’s diminishing resources.
Britain was a shell, a tourist attraction, a moldering hulk immo-bilized by economic woes. France, Spain, Italy? Business as usual; nothing new. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Northern countries? All well, thank you, but no sudden bursts of progress. After all, progress was tied to change, which might mean unrest, and unrest led to — well, to trouble. For Europe, trouble might mean war, and that meant death. Who wants to light a match in a fireworks factory? Europe wanted no wars, no trampling armies, no bright, atomic suns kindling over Rome, Zurich, London, or Berlin.
The only real winner over the past century had been Israel. The Zionists had busily expanded their “defenses” and “retaliated” themselves into the position of the major power in the Middle East. Israel owned everything from Libya over through Iraq and into Iran: more than five million square kilometers of territory and about a hundred million sullen slaves! Even President Rubin’s friendly American government occasionally made tsk-tsking noises at the Zionists’ odd conception of “civil rights” for their Arab citizenry. Nobody listened to the Arabs, as one might expect, except the United Nations — which had become a meaningless wailing wall for the powerless. The Israelis made good use of propaganda. They squawked about “provocations,” then they “retaliated.” When those arguments didn’t work, they trotted out their century-old lamenta-tions about the “Holocaust” yet again, and their Western critics fell into embarrassed, silence, as always.
The Russians hadn’t changed much in the last forty years either, it was just like it had been before the collapse of communism back at the beginning of the 1990s: the same secretive bureaucracies, the same missiles festooned with warheads like Christmas-tree lights, and the whole gamut of social injustices — which the Soviets saw as properly necessary measures to hold a restless and disillusioned empire together. They held down their end of the teeter-totter nicely. No wars, no forays into alien lands, a few “advisors” here and there, maybe, and lots of propaganda. Balance. The Soviets understood the lesson of Hanoi and Shanghai too.
Balance did impel the Russians to take Pakistan into protective custody, using the “Red Mullah,” Sajid Ali Lahori, as their puppet jailer. Central and South America were not yet their property, but several presidents, generalissimos, dictators, and “People’s Revolutionary Heroes” jigged obediently whenever the Kremlin played the balalaika. During the past century various South American nations went from democracies to People’s Republics to military tyrannies and back again to democracies. Not even the historians could keep track. Ceniral America served as a free-fire zone for weapons testing, causing local misery and evoking dismal cries from the drug smugglers whenever somebody napalmed their coca or cannabis crops. Yet nothing halted the violence. Cuba was once more solidly pro-America (or pro-Big Crime, depending upon one’s point of view). Castro’s death in 1997 and the abysmal failures of his short-lived successors quietly ended any hopes the Soviets had for a foothold close to the United States. Moscow shrugged, figuratively, and sought elsewhere.
China was the third major party to the balancing act, its hegemony spread through Thailand, Burma, and above India’s northern frontiers to confront the Russians in Pakistan. The Americans believed — hoped and prayed were more truthful — that Peking would come down on their side in any shoot-out. Japan was still mostly in the American camp, although Japan now owned a lot of that camp and would have much to say in the international corporocracy taking shape to rule the decades to come. Korea, unified after the strife of 1998, was as Russian as Tashkent. Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, New Guinea, and the United Republics of the South Pacific were supposedly within the American perimeter; they squabbled, fought, and shook with political convulsions as devastating as their lava-spouting volcanos. Australia and New Zealand went their own way, still profoundly British but aloof from the woes of Europe and the Americas. In 2009 a large part of Canada offered to join the United States, but Congress still hadn’t ratified the accession three decades later; there were too many other things to worry about.
The saddest of all was Africa. The Israelis occupied the northeast, the United Islamic Republic of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia the northwest, and the interior was mostly up for grabs, all the way down to the fortress-state of South Africa, stronger than ever behind its Siegfried Line of bunkers and barbed wire and mercenary battalions. Africa was the favored playground of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Africans had little to say about it; they starved, suffered, and died on cue, just bit-players in the tragicomedy of history.