The books he had read in Del Azarchel’s chalet in Alaska he found dull now that he had time to reread them—Montrose was pleased that he could summon up perfectly detailed pictures even of pages he had been flipping past without reading, and, as if looking at a photograph, read them normally. He found his reading speed increased when he invented (since this was a dream, after all) a cartoon character named Cyrano Widget to do the reading for him, and just give him a summary. Cyrano was human from the face down, but had a clear dome for a skull, in which an electronic brain could be seen winking and sparkling furiously.
Cyrano, sitting in the imaginary schoolhouse, shook its absurd cyborg head, and said, “Boss, Blackie Del Azarchel does not know what he is dealing with here.” Onto the blackboard the cyborg chalked an equation. It was a divarication function, showing the change in prices of various goods, the crime rate, and the frequency of the use of certain emotion-laden terms in the popular media. All this raw information had been in Del Azarchel’s books, but he had never put two and two together.
“Boss, look at these graphs, these tendencies. The cost of railgun components does not go up unless someone is buying and building a filthload of them.”
“What’s it mean?”
“War.”
Montrose looked at the graphs in wonder. “But I thought Blackie had the whole world figured out. He said he had a science, called Cliometry, that could forecast political and economic changes. He can’t see a war coming?”
The cartoon character leaned back on his imaginary school desk. “He sees it coming, and he is trying to avoid it.”
“What’s causing the problem?”
“Two problems. One is political. Lowering the price of travel to zero means that whole populations are within elbow-rubbing distance of each other. There are no national boundaries anymore.”
“Isn’t that good for the economy? Lowers the cost of shipping workers to where the work is, right? Free trade, free movement of goods, all that.”
“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.”