Beijing: “We’ve capped rent increases, and we’ve been acquiring land less rapidly, just as the Censor recommended.”
I: “Yes, you have. You’ve made good efforts, the Censor’s data reflects that. But people are already so worried about it, and there are so many hostile counter-campaigns, so many people riled up, most people aren’t aware you’ve slowed down, they just see Mitsubishi landlords on every street and feel like you’re eating up more land even if you aren’t. Sugiyama’s list will make it worse, much worse.”
Beijing: “Why? Who is this François Quesnay?”
I: “Was, not is, Director. François Quesnay is a historical figure. Sugiyama was planning one of their clever presence-by-absence pieces.” Those in the room seemed to lack enthusiasm for the journalistic art. “François Quesnay was one of the leaders of the physiocrats, a group of European economists influential in the Seventeenth Century, at the very birth of modern economic theory. They believed that wealth and value came from land, shared your idea about the ‘source’ in a sense.” I smiled, thinking how much more clumsily I would have phrased this without His frame to guide me. “When Adam Smith came along, a big part of what they did was disagree with the physiocrats, saying the source of wealth was labor, not land. Everyone since has basically agreed with Smith, even Marx and Morais, though they refined it with ideas about capital and axons. But these days everyone pretty much thinks in terms of human labor as the source, population, work hours, especially with the Hive system, Hives competing for more Members, seeming strong or weak based on how many they gain, or lose. Everyone counts people, Directors. Everyone except you.”
“I don’t disagree with Marx and Smith,” Beijing boasted. “We value our size, our people.”
J.E.D.D. Mason cut in softly. “How many voting shares are presently pledged to you, Director?”
“One point two billion.”
“Precisely how many?” He pressed.
“One billion, two hundred thirty-two million, four hundred thousand and some.”
“How many people? How many Members pledged their voting shares to you to make that bloc?”
“About a hundred and fifty million.”
“Precisely how many?”
Beijing frowned at his companions. “Maybe slightly under one hundred fifty?”
He does not nod. “You know much more precisely how much of Nature you represent than how many people.”
Again I smiled, seeing how His meandering demonstration made the point more clearly than the straight-seeming path. “Exactly,” I confirmed. “These days not even Gordian still clings to the corporate model so closely as to distribute Brillist votes by share instead of by person. Sugiyama’s editorial on François Quesnay would have been their manifesto that the Mitsubishi shareholder democracy has failed.”
“Shareholder democracy makes us strong,” Korea objected fastest. “It’s an incentive. Our Members work harder to get property, own their homes, invest, knowing hard work will make their voices stronger, one share-vote at a time.”
Young Shanghai nodded. “We own more than half the property on Earth now. That proves our system works.”
There was pride in Korea’s glance at Bandyopadhyay here, or, I should say, at India, for, back when the Mitsubishi Hive proposed its mighty marriage with Greenpeace, it had lusted after more than Greenpeace’s twelve billion acres of nature reserve and five hundred million nature-loving Members. It lusted after India. The lion’s share of the Indian nation-strat was always with Greenpeace, and an entrenched cultural tick, something between tradition and self-defense, makes Indian landowners intractably unwilling to sell India’s land to outsiders. That made the subcontinent the last delicious corner of the Earth which had few Mitsubishi landlords. What Mitsubishi can’t buy, they adopt.
J.E.D.D. Mason’s voice was gentle as a chant. “One vote for being a Member, two for owning an apartment, five for a house, twenty for a factory, thirty for a forest, none for an idea.”
I: “You’re the richest Hive measured in land, but what if we measure by manpower?”
Shanghai: “The Masons win by their standard and we win by ours, I see that. That doesn’t make us wrong.”
I: “But there aren’t only two measures, Directors. There are many. Measure by income: half the human race pays rent to you, but Utopia earns more for its services and inventions. Or measure by output: you say shareholder democracy makes your Members work harder, but every single Utopian is a vocateur.”
Younger Shanghai: “The Utopians aren’t a competitor. No matter what they earn, they can’t grow while they spend it all on their Moon Base and lobbing junk at Mars.”
“Terraforming,” I corrected. “It is terraforming. In two hundred and fifty years it will be done. Even if you own this world by then, Utopia will own another one.”
Is it not miraculous, reader, the power of the mind to believe and not believe at once? We all know the powers of Utopia. We see their living wonders fill the streets, cheer as they conquer syndromes, hire them to make the impossible possible for us job after job. We even trust them with this hunt for the dread Gyges Device. Yet we still think and plan for the world. One world. We never doubt that every individual shipment they send to Mars must be successful, that their science is sound, their effort proceeding, but somehow we do not believe the distant end will ever come. These Nine Directors don’t believe Utopians will really live on Mars in 2660. Utopians do.
“If land is not the source,” I continued, “then you lose to the Masons. If it is, you lose long-term to the Utopians. Sugiyama’s editorial will say this, and, coming from your most prominent journalist, it will shatter the public’s faith in your timocracy.”
“Shareholder democracy,” younger Shanghai corrected.
“Timocracy is what the other Hives are seeing.” Director Bandyopadhyay leaned forward until the polished board table glowed with the reflected coral-fire blossoms of her jacket. “Whatever you say about the benefits of having both personal votes and property votes, you know the other Hives look at us, they look at me, they look at how our second-largest nation-strat can only secure one seat at this table, because the lot of you”—her gesture encompassed all of them, but her eye fell most on Andō and Kimura Kunie, whose hundred million Japanese strat-Members boasted two Directors while India’s near-billion fought for one—“have had your strats eating up property as hard as you can for generations. They think they see us all racing with each other to eat up more, even if we aren’t. Every doubt and bad feeling other Hives have, and every late rent fee they’ve ever resented, it adds up.” She turned back to the camera. “This could be some anti-land-grab group playing extremely dirty. Do we even know this is the real Canner Device? Someone with a vague sense that it could smear us may have created their own tracker hacker to make us look dirty.”
The suggestion struck me like a ray of light.
Shanghai killed it with a cloud: “Utopians? Hired Utopians could do it, or the Hive itself.”
“Do your predictions think they’ll benefit from this? What does the Censor’s office say?”
I winced. “You can probably guess. The Masons are predicted to gain most from the Members and investments that leave you. Cousins and Humanists will benefit as well. More details are … in flux.”
“And the Utopians?” Shanghai pressed. “You just said we’re in a long-term, two-planet land race, and here we’re trusting them with the investigation. What if it was them?”