in residual-emergent models, any given economic system or historical moment is an unstable mix of past and future systems. Capitalism therefore was the combination or battleground of its residual element, feudalism, and its emergent element—what?
with the success of the Martian revolution and the emergence of its single planetwide social-democratic system, the gates were opened for the rest of the solar system to follow. Many space settlements remained colonies of Terran nations and combines, however, so the ultimate result was a patchwork of systems somewhat resembling anarchy. Much of the space economy came to be dominated by a league of settlements called the Mondragon Accord. The Accord was renewed at a conference every five years, and annually the Accord’s AIs called out its economy, thereafter correcting it frequently (several times a second)
the longer the Mondragon Accord went on, the more robust it got. Confident in the Accord’s support of the necessities, individual settlements’ enterprise markets made more and more side deals, the so-called above and beyonds, all working on the margin. If not for Mars and its
as feudalism is the residual on Earth, capitalism is the residual on Mars
the margin itself grows with prosperity, resulting in increasing sophistication and culture
the existence of the marginal economy, semiautonomous, semi-unregulated, resembling anarchy, filled with fraud, double-dealing, and crime, delighted all free marketeers, libertarians, anarchists, and many others, some enjoying the bonobo barter and others the machismo of a wild west and wealth beyond need
marginal capitalism is a tough-guy sport like rugby or tackle football, suitable mostly for people slightly overdosed on testosterone. On the other hand, with some rule and attitude changes, it has proven it can be an interesting game, even beautiful, like baseball or volleyball. It is a valid project at the margin, a form of self-actualization, not to be applied to the necessities, but on the margin a nice hobby, even perhaps an art form
confining capitalism to the margin was the great Martian achievement, like defeating the mob or any other protection racket
WAHRAM AND SWAN
Wahram was back in Terminator before Swan returned from Earth. At that point the city was sliding over the immense plain of Beethoven Crater, and Wahram screwed his courage to the sticking point and when she got into town, asked Swan if she wanted to go out with him to a facility in the west wall of Beethoven, to hear a concert and catch up on things. As he made the call, he was, he had to admit, nervous. Her quicksilver manner left him uncertain what to expect; he could not even predict whether he would be going out to Beethoven with her or with Pauline. On the other hand, he liked Pauline; so hopefully it would be all right either way. And with luck Swan would no longer be so intent to learn all there was to know about Alex’s plans concerning the qubes. That, Inspector Genette had made very clear, they had to keep from her.
In any case, the chance to hear some Beethoven was enough to spur him on. He made the call; and Swan agreed to go.
After that Wahram looked up the program for the performance they were to attend, and was excited to see it was a triple bill of rarely played transcriptions: first a wind ensemble playing a transcription of the Appassionata piano sonata; then Beethoven’s opus 134, which was his own transcription for two pianos of his Grosse Fugue for string quartet, opus 133. Lastly a string quartet was to play a transcription of their own for the Hammerklavier sonata.
Brilliant programming, Wahram felt, and he joined Swan at the south lock of Terminator with an anticipation so strong that it overwhelmed the uneasiness he felt both about her and about being outside Terminator, on the surface of Mercury. Necessary movement westward—well, this was always true in some sense, he told himself, and focused his thoughts on the concert. Maybe there was no real reason for concern. It was interesting to think that he might be irrationally afraid of the sun.
At the little museum in the west wall of Beethoven, he was astonished to see that they were almost the only people in the audience, aside from the musicians not playing, who sat in the front rows to listen. The facility had an empty main room that would have held a few thousand people, but happily this concert was in a side hall with just a couple hundred seats, arced around a small stage in Greek theater style. Acoustics were excellent.
The wind ensemble, slightly outnumbering its audience, rollicked its way through the finale of the Appassionata in a way that made it one of the greatest wind pieces Wahram had ever heard, fast to the point of effervescence. The transcription to winds made it a new thing in the same way that Ravel had made Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition a new thing.
When they were done, two pianists got up, and sitting at grand pianos snuggled into each other like two sleeping cats, they played Beethoven’s own opus 134, his transcription of his Grosse Fugue. They had to pound away like percussionists, simply hammering the keys. More clearly than ever Wahram heard the intricate weave of the big fugue, also the crazy energy of the thing, the maniacal vision of a crushing clockwork. The sharp attack of struck piano keys gave the piece a clarity and violence that strings with the best will and technique in the world could not achieve. Wonderful.
Then some other transcriber had gone in the opposition direction, arranging the Hammerklavier sonata for string quartet. Here, even though four instruments were now playing a piece written for one, it was still a challenge to convey the Hammerklavier’s intensity. Broken out among two violins, viola, and cello, it all unpacked beautifully: the magnificent anger of the first movement; the aching beauty of the slow movement, one of Beethoven’s finest; and then the finale, another big fugue. It all sounded very like the late quartets to Wahram’s ear—thus a new late quartet, by God! It was tremendous to hear. Wahram glanced around at the audience and saw the wind players and the pianists were standing on their feet behind the chairs, bouncing, swaying in place, faces uplifted and eyes closed, as if in prayer; hands sometimes spastically waving before them, as if conducting or dancing. Swan too was back there dancing, looking transported. Wahram was very pleased to see that; he was out there himself in the space of Beethoven, a very great space indeed. It would have been shocking to see someone immune to it; it would have put her outside his zone of sympathy or comprehension.
Afterward, as an encore, the musicians announced they wanted to try an experiment. They separated the two pianos, and the string quartet then sat between them, in a circle facing inward; then they reprised the two big fugues, all playing at the same time. The two pieces overlapped with the wrong instruments applied to each, increasing the cognitive confusion; and the quiet parts in each came at the same time, in an urgent eye of the storm, revealing the structural similarity of the two monsters. When both returned to their main fugues, the six instruments sawed or pounded away in their own worlds, lashing out six different tunes in a crisscross fury, with Messiaenic crashes. They ended together somehow. Wahram wasn’t certain which of them had been extended or curtailed to make that happen, but in any case they finished together with a big crash, and everyone there, already on their feet, could only clap and cheer and whistle.
“Wonderful,” Wahram said afterward. “Truly.”
Swan shook her head. “Too crazy at the end, but I liked it.”
They stayed around to join the congratulations and the discussion among the musicians, who were as interested as could be in what it had sounded like from the outside; more than one said they had been able to focus only on their own parts. Someone played back a recording made of it, and they listened along with the rest, until the musicians began to pause the recording and discuss details.
“Time to get back to Terminator,” Swan said.
“All right. Thanks ever so much for this, it was very fine.”
“My pleasure. Listen, do you want to walk back over to the city tracks? It’s nice after a wild concert like this one. They’ve got suits here we can use. It gives you a chance to walk it out a little.”
“But—do we have time?”
“O
h yes. We’ll get to the platform well ahead of the city. I’ve done this before.”
She must not have noticed his discomfort at being out on the surface of Mercury. Well, so he had to agree. Even though every other member of the audience, and the musicians too, took the tram back. On which they were almost certainly continuing the interesting discussion of the concert, of transpositions in Beethoven, and so on.
But no. A walk on a burned world. When their borrowed spacesuits had confirmed integrity, they exited the hall’s air lock and headed back north toward Terminator’s tracks.
Beethoven Crater had as smooth a surface as he had seen on Mercury. Little Bello was under the horizon to the east. Wahram walked along nervously. Their headlamps illuminated long ellipses of black desert. Fines lofted from the fronts of their boots and drifted back to the baked ground behind them. Their boot prints would last for a billion years, but they were on a track of prints, and the damage to the surface had long since been done. Flanking the dusty trail, the knobby granulated rock caught their headlamps’ beams and reflected them in little diamond pricks of light that looked like frost, though they must have been minute crystal surfaces. They passed a rock with a Kokopelli painted on it; the figure appeared to be holding a telescope rather than a flute and was pointing the glass to the east. For a while Wahram whistled the theme of the Grosse Fugue, half speed, under his breath.
“Do you whistle?” Swan asked, sounding surprised.
“I suppose I do.”
“So do I!”
Wahram, who did not think of himself as someone who whistled for others, did not continue.
They topped a small rise, and before them lay Terminator’s tracks. No city in sight yet; one had to assume it was still over the horizon to the east. The nearest track blocked the view of most of those paralleling it on its other side. It was made of a particular kind of tempered steel, he had heard, and gleamed a dull silver in the starlight. Its underside stood a few meters above the ground, and the thick pylons supporting it were set every fifty meters or so. A loading platform abutted the outer track to the northwest of them, he was happy to see. The tram from the concert was already there.
Sunlight pricked a high point on the west wall of Beethoven. Everything in the landscape was lit by that burnished cliff edge. Dawn was on its way, slow but sure. When it came over the eastern horizon Terminator would make a grand sight. Possibly that was the dome of the globe, already visible as a curved glint.
A stupendous flash of light blazed up from the tracks where the loading platform had been. A bloodred afterimage split his vision in two halves; as it was pulsing back to a less vivid vertical blob, rocks began crashing down around them, kicking up puffs of dust that moved like splashed water. They both cried out, although Wahram had no idea what either said; then Swan was crying, “Get down, guard your head!” and tugging at his arm. Wahram kneeled next to her and put an arm around her shoulders; she seemed to be trying to put her arms over his helmet while ducking hers against his chest. Looking over her, he saw that the tracks where the platform had been had disappeared in a big ball of dust, and the very top of the dust cloud was now high enough to be up in the sunlight. The brilliant yellow of the sunlit part of the cloud illuminated the land around it like a beacon of fire. The land at the foot of the cloud was glowing with a light of its own; it appeared to be a pool of smoking lava.
“A meteor,” he said stupidly.
Swan was talking on the common band. A few more rocks fell on the land around them, invisible until announced by an explosion of dust. It looked like the land was exploding, as if mines were going off. Occasionally a falling rock was hot and looked like a shooting star. Some ember blinks were still up there flying among the stars. They would get hit or they wouldn’t: an awful feeling. Guarding their helmets did not seem like it was going to do much good.
Dust flew up over them, fell back to land in lazy sheets and veils. Gray topped by yellow; but when the top of the dust cloud fell back below the horizontal beams of approaching sunlight, they were plunged into the darkness of Mercurial night, with only the distant lit crater wall to illuminate them with its reflection. Red bars still pulsed vertically in the middle of Wahram’s sight. It seemed much dimmer than it had before.
“There’s a group of sunwalkers just south of here, up under the crater wall,” Swan said grimly. She asked a question on the common band. “One of them’s been hit, and they need help. Come on.”
He followed her away from the tracks, feeling blind and confused. “Was it a meteor strike?”
“Looks like it. Although the tracks have a detect-and-deflect system, so I don’t know what happened. Come on, we’ve got to hurry! I want to get back to the city. It’s… ohhh….” She groaned as the realization appeared to strike her that the city was doomed. “No!” she cried as she dragged him southward. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Over and over as they stumbled along. Then: “How could it be.”
He couldn’t tell if it was a rhetorical question. “Don’t know,” he said. She tugged at him and he kept his eyes on the ground to keep from kicking a rock and falling. Rocks littered the land. He tried to remember what he had seen; had it been a flash? From above? Hadn’t it risen? No—a downward motion. He closed his eyes, but the red bar and light red clouds still bounced around on the black backdrop of the insides of his eyelids. He opened his eyes, glanced at Swan. Later perhaps they could review her qube’s visual record, assuming it kept one. She was muttering now in the irritated tone of voice she seemed to use only when addressing it.
She led him around a hillock, and when they had cleared it, they spotted a group of three people in spacesuits, all three walking, which was good to see, but with one holding one arm with the other hand, and walking awkwardly as a result. The other two flanked this one, helping or trying to.
“Hey!” Swan said on the common band, and they looked up and saw them approaching. One waved. Swan and Wahram joined them a few minutes later.
“How are you?” Swan said.
“Happy to be alive,” said the one holding an arm. “I got hit on the arm!”
“I can see. Let’s get back to the city.”
“What happened?”
“A meteor hit the tracks, it looked like.”
“How could that be?”
“I don’t know. Come on!”
Without further discussion the five of them began walking at speed toward the tracks, striding along in a Martian lope that made the best of the local g. Wahram was all right at it because of his time on Titan, which was about half as heavy as this, but similar enough. Together they bounded down the mild slope, angling eastward to intercept the city as soon as possible. There was a strange keening in Wahram’s ear, an animal moan of distress; at first he thought it was the hurt sunwalker, but then realized it was Swan. Of course it was her city, her home.
They came over a rise that gave them a view of the top half of the city’s dome, bulging over the horizon like the blue bubble of a pocket universe. The city appeared to be moving still. “The tracks ahead of it are damaged,” he said.
“Yes, of course!”
“Is there a way for it to get past a section of broken track?”
“No! How would that work?”
“I don’t know, I’m just… wondering. It seems like most support systems try to avoid criticalities.”
“Of course. But the tracks are protected, there’s an anti-meteor system!”
“It must not have worked?”
“Apparently not!” Again she cried out, a piercing sound in his ear even when damped by his suit’s intercom.
The sunwalkers were chattering among themselves, sounding worried.
“What will we do when we get to it?” Wahram asked on the common band.
Swan stopped groaning and said, “What do you mean?”
“Are there lifeboats? You know—rovers to drive to the nearest spaceport?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Enough for everyone?”
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“Yes!”
“And are there spaceships enough at the nearest spaceport? Enough for the whole population of Terminator?”
“There’s shelter in all the spaceports, enough to hold a lot of people. And vehicles to go west to the next ones. And some hoppers can handle being on the brightside.”
As they hurried across the black rubbly plain, Terminator slowly hove up over the horizon. The upper half of the interior of the Dawn Wall was now visible, looking much steeper than it really was, all whitewashed walls and trees. A thick bar of green marked the treetops of the park. Extending forward from the trees were the crops of the farm. A snow globe on silver tracks, headed to its doom. They could see no people in the city, even though it was now looming above them. Certainly no one was on the terraces of the Dawn Wall anymore. It looked abandoned.
And there was no way to get up into it. The platform had been in the impact zone. Everyone who had been at the concert must have been killed. Inside the city they could see a trio of deer: buck, doe, fawn. Swan’s cries pitched up an octave. “No. No!”
It was strange to be standing there, looking up at the empty city’s Mediterranean calm.
Swan ran under the tracks to the north side of the city, and the rest of them followed. From that side they could see a little convoy of ground vehicles far to the north and west, rolling away from them through the break in Beethoven’s northwest wall. The cars were fast, and soon over the horizon.
“They’ve left,” Wahram observed.
“Yes yes. Pauline?”