The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  One time one of the refugees in the park on the eastern side of the bridge was sick, and fell, after perhaps fainting. A quick little crowd surrounded him, and Frank joined them to see what he could do, his heart racing. He saw none of them seemed to have mobile phones, or maybe they were afraid to use them, and so he went to the little phone box on the bridge end and punched the button for the local 911, then asked for help in German, giving the situation and then the address, which he assumed they already had. He felt a brief sense of accomplishment in saying all that in German, then stood at the edge of the group watching, feeling so sick he worried that he too would keel over. When the ambulance arrived with its weird European siren, most of the people surrounding the stricken man disappeared. The emergency medical people approached and then a pair of police, both women; more refugees disappeared, until it was only the stricken one and Frank. Frank gestured the police over. One of them held a scanner in front of the man’s face and clicked a photo and looked at the result. Possibly there would be an RFID embedded in the man’s skin too, there to be read by the scanner.

  Then the policewoman with the scanner glanced at Frank and stood up straight, holding the scanner toward him, gesturing at him with her other hand.

  The other policewoman said “Nei,” Swiss for Nein, and the one with the scanner returned to the stricken person. Frank nodded his appreciation to the one who had stopped her colleague, and when the emergency crew had the young man on a stretcher, Frank turned and walked away, shivering in the chill gray wind.

  In the summers it was different. Some organization, maybe the Red Cross, maybe the Red Crescent, often set up a big open-sided tent in the western bridge park, and cooked food and gave out free meals. They were uninterested in finding out who they were serving, it was all anonymous on both sides of the table. It got hot and steamy on some days, which put Frank on edge, but he ignored that and did what he could to help. Set up, clean up. He didn’t serve food, and he tried not to look at the people eating. It was too hot, too familiar. He didn’t want to recognize what he was feeling, he looked around under the edge of the tent roof to see Zurich sights— the stone, the trees, the blue and white. Smell of bratwurst and beer. Red geraniums. Stolid medieval edge of the Rathaus, there upriver as far as he could see, visible through linden trees. Cold northern land, cool sober people, cool to the eye and the mind.

  But not the people taking refuge here. The Fremdenkontrolle, the Stranger Control, a bureau of the police, estimated that there were now five million native Swiss and three million Ausländer within the borders. This ratio, one of the most extreme in the world, had caused membership in the various right-wing anti-immigrant parties in Switzerland to swell, and now they held a dozen or more seats in the Swiss legislature, led by the SVP, the Swiss People’s Party. There were about thirty political parties in Switzerland, and all the ruling coalitions in the federal government were formed by majorities created by alliances between the central parties; center-right, center-left, with the more radical parties on each side just barely earning seats. SVP had even held a majority for a while, then after the heat wave it had lost popularity. Now they did better in the cantonal governments, but these had had their power shifted over the years to Bern’s federal government— not entirely, but in national matters like this one, the federal government tended to get its way. The upshot seemed to be that there was a lot of pent-up anger in the anti-immigrant crowd, as they saw their country being “overrun,” with nothing they could do about it, at the political level anyway.

  Maybe it was this way everywhere. Now, whenever Frank saw small groups of obvious Ausländer, people from the global south or even the Balkans, walking in areas of the city where they might get accosted, he would strike up a conversation with them in English and walk with them. He saw it help once or twice. Racists were confused by mixed-race situations, so a white man with these dark-skinned people gave them pause. If it were a dark-skinned man with a Swiss woman it might make them angry, even though this was a common sight; but a white man with people of color was different, and anyway it took some evaluation before any racist could decide to get angry, so that created some time, and if one walked fast, staying on lit streets, which in Zurich meant any street not an alley in the Niederdorf, it would be enough to keep from getting assaulted, except by some guttural comments hurled one’s way, comments designed not to be understood. So he walked with them when he could.

  But then a day came when he saw a group of young Swiss men standing on the bridge looking at the big meal tent. Though it was hot, the air had gone dark; there were clouds building overhead, a thunderstorm was imminent. It would be a relief when it came. For now, it was getting hotter.

  Big fat raindrops began to spatter the pavers outside the tent. All of a sudden they were in a downpour, and in that same moment the young Swiss men charged the tent throwing pavers and shouting. They were going for the servers as well as the guests, and people were screaming and going down, there was blood splashing from nowhere into reality, and seeing that, many among the refugees charged their assailants screaming with fury. Pavers gone, the Swiss thugs had nothing but their fists, but they too were enraged, and a donnybrook of punching and shoving and shouting erupted outside one edge of the tent. The Swiss who ran away were tackled or kicked in the back, the moves familiar and practiced from soccer pitches at their worst. The Swiss thugs then realized they had to retreat while still facing the refugee fighters, at least until they could get a clear route away. Some of them ran across a street right in front of a tram, which squealed down past them and gave them some cover for their retreat.

  After that, wet people, screams, crying, blood on the ground and on the tabletops, which were now commandeered to lay injured people on something other than the cold wet ground. Police arrived, and clumps of quivering shouting people surrounded them to tell the tale of the outrage. The police teams went from person to person in the following hour, and Frank stayed, too upset by what he had seen to leave. He had to testify. But everyone the police interviewed they were also scanning, and when they were done talking to Frank, having done the same to him, they looked at each other. One of them was showing his scanner to his colleagues. These approached Frank and then surrounded him.

  “Sorry,” one of them said to him in English. “There is a warrant out for your arrest. Please come with us.”

  48

  Babies crying at dawn. Already hot. People hungry. Sun over the hills like a bomb. Hot on the skin. Don’t look that way or you’ll be seeing white all morning. Shadows running off the west edge of the world. It’ll be that way until the tent roof blocks the glare, about nine. By then it will be too hot to move. Better to sweat than not. Dust settles on the sweat and you can see little tracks of mud on your skin. Showers not till Saturday. It’s my time of the month. Need that shower.

  The dining tent opens at eight, still lit by the horizontal light. Long line of people at the entrance. People let the moms with little kids go first. Most people anyway. They’re stacked up next to the entry, line collapsing, fretting. Unless you’re starved, it’s easier to hang back. Not to mention the right thing to do. After a while it’s just a habit. You go where you’ve gone before. The group of women I usually join is there trying to stay normal, talk.

  Inside the smell of eggs and onion and paprika. Big bowls of plain yogurt, my favorite. Load up on that and hope to last till nightfall. Skip the trials of the midday meal. It’s too much sorrow to go through the dining hall three times in a day. People are exposed there, fretting and anxious, hot and hungry.

  And bored. The same food, the same faces. Nothing else to do but eat.

  The aid workers are from some northern country. They talk among themselves. Some are quiet and serious, others laughing and animated. Clean. They sweat but they’re clean. I don’t know where they come from. Sometimes I recognize faces, not just the handsome men, but a look, something in their look will catch my eye long enough to impress that face on me. After that I can’t help
seeing them. Not that they see me. When they work the serving line, dishing out food onto our plates, they make eye contact and ask if we want what they’re serving, but very few of them really see us in any way that would register on them. It’s one way to do their job without getting too sad. Even so they burn out pretty fast. Or maybe their deal is short. Either way, they come, they go. They aren’t quite there and they aren’t really real.

  But it’s important to refuse to get angry at them. You focus your feelings on what you can see, that’s just the way people are. So there’s a world out there of people who have put us in this camp. Not all of them specifically did it, but they’re all part of it. They live in a world where this camp exists, and they go on. Anyone would.

  But it adds up to us being imprisoned here, for nothing we’ve done except to live. Just the way it is. People know we’re here, but there’s nothing they can do about it. Or so they tell themselves. And in truth it would take a lot of doing to release all the people incarcerated in this world. So they don’t. They focus their thoughts elsewhere and forget about us. I would do that myself. In fact I did do that myself. Only when things fall apart do you realize it can happen to you. You never think it can happen to you, until it does.

  So then, some of these people volunteer to come to our camp and help feed us and do everything else that needs doing when you have eighteen thousand people stuck inside a fence unable to leave. Cleaning toilets, washing sheets, all that. And of course feeding us. Three meals a day. That’s a lot of work. And yet here they are. Most of them are young, not all, but it takes a certain idealism, and that’s mainly a young person’s feeling. They are almost all younger than me now, but not so long ago, when I first came here, they were my age. And they learn things and see the world and meet other people like themselves and so on. And so they have to keep a distance from us, they have to or else they would become as unhappy as we are. At their best they are still indignant in our cause, and that’s a stress on them. So they have to keep that distance. I know that.

  But I still hate them for not seeing me. For looking me in the eye while they put food on my outstretched plate, and yet never seeing. I try not to but I hate them. Just as I hate everything else in this life.

  No one likes to feel gratitude. Gratitude is recommended by the clerics but I say no one likes it, no one. Not even the clerics. They go into their trade in order never to be in a position to have to feel it. They receive our gratitude as they receive our pain, but they never have to give gratitude themselves. Or only in their professional capacity as our receptacles of feeling and of meaning, our representatives to God or whomever. No, I don’t like clerics either.

  When the sun is far enough to the west that I can do it without being scorched, I walk out to the northern perimeter of the camp to look at the hills. I should be back in the tent where we teach the children, and I’ll get there eventually, but first I come out here. The hills still remind me of my home hills where I grew up, even though these are as green as limes. There’s a ridgeline that looks just like the one I used to look at from our town when I was a girl. In late spring our hills would turn green also, not this wet green, but green enough: olive and forest green, in a dapple of furzes. I look through the links of the fence, which is like any fence anywhere, but topped with rolls of razor wire. Yes, we are prisoners here. They don’t want us getting any idea that we’re not, by way of looking at a fence that could be climbed. As for the wire mesh itself, it looks weak, like you could cut it easily, not with scissors maybe, but with tin snips for sure. No problem. But we have no tin snips in this camp.

  So I lean against the wire mesh and feel it bell out under my weight. The bottom of the wire is dug into the earth pretty far, I can see that. Once upon a time it might have been possible to dig it up to crawl under it, with a spoon or one’s fingers even. But now the dirt has flowed together and hardened. It would take some effort to dig under it, and worse, some time. They would see me. Still, I consider it every time I come out here. At sunset when I’m here I see the last of the sunlight pinking the ridgeline at the top of the hills, and I scuff at the dirt. No way. Maybe. No way. Maybe.

  The sun goes down, the sky goes twilight blue. Then indigo. This is the 1,859th day I have spent in this camp.

  49

  In July of 1944, the United States government convened a group of seven hundred delegates, from all the Allied countries, to design the postwar financial order. They met at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and there, after three weeks of meetings, they published recommendations that when ratified by the member governments resulted in the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Monetary Fund. The intended results of these new entities included the establishment of open markets and the stability of member nations’ currencies.

  An international trade organization was also proposed, but when the US Senate failed to ratify this part of the proposal, it was not founded. Later the GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was established and took on the functions that the failed ITO would have fulfilled. Later the GATT was superseded by the World Trade Organization.

  John Maynard Keynes, the chief British negotiator, also suggested at Bretton Woods that they found an International Clearing Union, which would make use of a new unit of currency to be called a bancor. The purpose of the bancor would be to allow nations with trade deficits to be able to climb out of their debts by calling on an overdraft account with the ICU that would allow them to spend money to employ more citizens and thus create more exports. Nations making use of their overdraft would be charged 10 percent interest on these bancor loans, which could not be traded for ordinary currencies, or by individuals. Nations with large trade surpluses would also be charged 10 percent interest on these surpluses, and if their credit exceeded an allowed maximum at the end of the year, the excess would be confiscated by the ICU. Keynes thus hoped to create an international balance of trade credit which would keep countries from becoming either too poor or too wealthy.

  Harry Dexter White, the assistant secretary of the US Treasury and the chief American negotiator, said of this plan, “we have taken the position of absolutely no.” As the world’s biggest creditor and holder of gold by far, the US was in a position to enter the postwar period as the sole owner of the major global currency, the US dollar, which was to be backed by gold reserves. White proposed an International Stabilization Fund, which would place the burden of debt firmly on deficit nations; this later became part of the World Bank.

  So at Bretton Woods, White’s plan prevailed over Keynes’s, and in the absence of the International Clearing Union and its bancor, postwar reconstruction and subsequent economic development was funded by the US dollar, which became the de facto global currency. The imperial coin, so to speak.

  50

  Mary returned to Europe, and from her base in Zurich began visiting the various central banks there, trying to improve on the unsuccessful meeting in San Francisco. In London she met with the chancellor of the exchequer, and some of the board members of the Bank of England.

  In the days before that meeting, she read up on the history of the Bank of England, and saw that it was important in the financial history of the world. 1694: Charles II and William III had been borrowing money from private banks and not paying them back, or else levying taxes on all kinds of activities to be able to afford to make their debt payments, and thus making life more expensive for everyone, except for the royals involved, who were less and less liable for their profligate spending. So a Scottish merchant, William Patterson, proposed that 1,268 creditors lend the English king 1.2 million pounds for a guaranteed rate of interest of eight percent, and once William III signed off on that, a big piece of the system of the current world fell into place. The capitalizing of state power now had its roots in private wealth; thus the rich and the state became co-dependents, two aspects of the same power structure.

  After that, the Bank of England became the me
chanism by which the financing of the state apparatus was monopolized by a small group of wealthy tradespeople, and the shift from feudal land power to bourgeois money power was complete. The state from then on was always indebted to private wealth, and so relied on the good will of particular private individuals, who were unelected and unrepresentative of anyone but their own class, and yet were inserted right into the heart of state power. The Bank of England had also been founded in a state of emergency, during a war; but there was always an emergency that would serve when it came to finding reasons to perpetuate and extend state power. So whatever the law said, in practice the bank/state combination did what it pleased.

  Naturally such a new thing was controversial. Tories of the time thought the Bank would lead to more parliamentary power, sapping the monarchy and leading to the mob; Whigs thought it was a mechanism by which the monarch would always escape paying his or her debts. Either way it was a rival to already-existing power bases, and was considered as such from the very start: an insulated enclave of power within government, made up of unelected rich bankers.