Retrotopia

by John Michael Greer

  “There’ve been oil shortages before,” I reminded him. “How did people deal with those?”

  “I don’t have the least idea,” he said. “That was then, this is now. But our people back in Philly are just aghast. They’re trying to game possible responses and coming up blank. I don’t know if there’s any option that will work at all.” He finished his drink, waved down a waiter and ordered a refill.

  I nodded and said something to keep him talking, and for the next two hours or so got an increasingly detailed account of just how screwed the Atlantic Republic was going to be without viable satellite services, foreign investment, or a reliable source of petroleum—we used less of that latter than most of the other North American republics, and a lot less than anybody thought of using back before the Second Civil War, but it was still something we couldn’t give up without landing in a world of hurt. All the while, though, I was trying to fit my head around the way he’d blown off my questions.

  The penny didn’t drop until I got him onto a taxi—he was pretty wobbly by then, so I paid his fare and told the driver where to take him—and stood there on the sidewalk watching the back of the thing pull away. Two weeks ago, I realized, I’d have done exactly the same thing. That was then, this is now, it’s different this time, that’s history, we need to be thinking ahead of the times, not behind them: how many times had I mouthed those same catchphrases?

  I’d meant to flag down another cab, but turned and started walking instead, taking the distant pale shape of the unfinished Capitol dome as my guide. Around me, Toledo went about its business as though this was just another day. The sky had cleared off, the wind was brisk but not too raw, and people were out on the sidewalks, shopping or heading for swing shift jobs or just taking in some fresh air. I passed moms and dads pushing strollers or walking with kids holding their hands, a middle-aged woman with dark glasses who had a guide dog leading her, working guys from the shipyard not far away heading home from work. The crisis that had the Atlantic Republic tottering was just another piece of news to them. It was interesting news; a paperboy came trotting along the street shouting “Extra! Latest news on the war down south!” and found plenty of customers. Still, they didn’t have to care. It wasn’t something that was going to throw them out of work and shred the fabric of their daily lives. And the reason was—

  The reason was that they had stopped saying “It’s different this time,” and started treating the past as a resource rather than an irrelevance.

  I kept walking. Everything I saw around me—the horsedrawn cabs, the streetcars, the comfortable and attractive brick buildings, the clothing everybody wore—had been quarried out of the past and refitted for use in the present, because each one of them worked better than the alternatives. The insight that had come crashing into my thoughts in the middle of Parsifal returned: for us, for people in the North American republics and everywhere else in the industrial world, the period of exploration was over, the period of performance had arrived, and we had plenty of data about what worked and what didn’t, if only we chose to use it.

  A streetcar went by, packed with workers on their way home; the conductor’s bell went ding-di-ding ding, the way conductors’ bells went on those same streets a hundred and fifty years before. I knew perfectly well why nobody in Philadelphia thought about putting streetcars back on the streets of the Atlantic Republic’s cities, to do a job they did better, and for much less money, than the shiny high-tech modern equivalents. I’d been in the middle of the groupthink that made progress look like the only option even when progress was half a century into negative returns. Everyone I knew was well aware that “newer” had stopped meaning “better” a long time ago, that every upgrade meant more problems and fewer benefits, that the latest must-have technologies did less and cost more than the last round, but nobody seemed to be able to draw the obvious conclusion.

  I shook my head and kept walking, while those ideas circled in my head.

  It must have been most of an hour later when I realized I’d overshot my hotel by a good dozen blocks. The Capitol dome was behind me, and I’d strayed into a neighborhood of narrow row houses with little shops at some of the street corners. It was pretty obviously working class territory, but the houses looked clean and well maintained, and little flower boxes here and there promised bright colors come spring. One of the houses had a FOR SALE sign on it; I’d expected FOR RENT, and then it sank in that in the Lakeland Republic, working class people could still afford to buy their own homes. I thought of the working class neighborhoods in Philly, full of dilapidated rental properties, which look like war zones and which you don’t walk into if you don’t want to be mugged or worse; the contrast stung.

  I took my bearings from the Capitol dome and started walking. By the time I got there, it must have been past five o’clock, and people were trickling out of the Capitol, heading toward the street and the line of cabs that waited there for fares. I recognized one of them at a glance; I’m glad to say she saw me and turned up the sidewalk to meet me.

  “Hello, Melanie,” I said.

  That got a tired smile. “Hello, Peter. Hell of a day.”

  “I won’t argue.” I considered the options. “Up for dinner?”

  “About that.”

  I gestured to one of the cabs; she smiled again, and the cabby bounded down from his seat and opened the door for us.

  We settled on a Greek restaurant close by, a place I’d been for lunch already. I passed that onto the driver as soon as we got into the cab, and slumped back against the leather seat as the driver climbed up onto the seat up front, snapped the reins, and got the horses moving. Neither Melanie nor I said anything. The lights of Toledo rolled by, and I wondered how many people behind the windows we passed were worrying about the war down south the way I was.

  It was maybe five minutes, if that, when the cab rolled to a stop, and the cabby swung down from his seat and popped open the door. I climbed down, paid him, reached out a hand for Melanie; she took it gratefully, got down onto the sidewalk. “Thank you,” she said, when the cabbie was driving off. “For a few minutes of silence, especially.”

  “We don’t have to talk over dinner,” I said as we headed toward the door.

  “Don’t worry about it. You won’t be screaming at me in an east Texas accent for an hour straight.”

  I gave her a questioning look, but by then we were inside and the greeter was headed our way. Once we were comfortably settled in a booth over to one side, and the waitress had handed us menus and taken our drinks order to the bar, I said, “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. The Texan ambassador wanted to see President Meeker right now, and no, she didn’t care that he was in a cabinet meeting and that she was going to be the first to see him afterwards. It’s one of the few times I’ve ever wished that diplomatic courtesies included the option of slapping someone hard enough to send teeth flying.”

  I choked, then pasted on a respectable expression while the waitress came back with our martinis and took our order. “I take it Texas doesn’t put professionals in its embassies.”

  “Only the important ones, and we’re not one of those. Velma Streiber’s a Houston society matron who has good friends in the Bulford administration and wanted a fancy title.” She shook her head.

  “I hope you didn’t have to deal with the Confederate ambassador too,” I said.

  “I did, but that was easy. John Bayard MacElroy is your basic Confederate gentleman. He might shoot you dead in cold blood and feed your bullet-riddled corpse to his hound dogs, but he’ll be the very soul of politeness while he does it.”

  I choked again. Then, still laughing, I shook my head and picked up my martini. She gave me a startled look. “That doesn’t look much like what you were drinking Friday night.”

  “It isn’t,” I admitted. “I decided to try a Lakeland style martini Saturday, and liked it.”

  That got me a long, considering look, and then a nod. “But that was my day—that and dealing
with just about every other embassy in Toledo by phone or in person, scheduling meetings with Meeker, setting up briefings like the one you went to, attending a couple of briefings myself. Oh, and helping out two delegations—I won’t say which ones—that lost their satellite links with home and have no idea how to get by without hardware in orbit.”

  That interested me. “I heard about that. How do your embassies phone home?”

  “Shortwave radio, of course—the way everybody did before satellites took over. I had to explain that to both delegations.” With a sly smile: “When the Atlantic Embassy loses its satellite links, have them give me a call. I can recommend a good radio firm that won’t even put bugs in the hardware.”

  I gave her a dubious look, and she laughed. “I hope the briefing you got was worthwhile, by the way.”

  “Even more so than I’d expected. Turns out you’re not the only people interested in freight transit through the New York canal system.”

  “Now surprise me.” She sipped her drink. “Missouri, East Canada, and who?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Oh, of course. That’s good to know; I’ll talk to Hank Barker with the Missouri delegation and see if we can coordinate shipping with them. We do a lot of trade with Missouri these days; the wool your suit is made of almost certainly came from their sheep, and possibly from their fabric mills.”

  “Barker mentioned that,” I said. “Wool and leather.”

  Two bowls of avgolemono soup came, and neither of us said anything until the waitress was gone. “I’m going to risk mentioning a potentially uncomfortable subject,” Melanie said. “The Missouri Republic is the one neighbor we’ve got that’s shown any interest at all in learning from our experience. They haven’t gone nearly as far as we have—you still see bioplastic clothing there, and they’ve still got a metanet, though it’s pretty ramshackle these days—but the World Bank doesn’t like them much any more.” She shook her head, laughed. “I’ve been told that people from the World Bank threatened them with trade sanctions two years ago, after they refused a loan, and President Applegate told them, ‘Didn’t hurt Lakeland much, did it?’ That shut them up.”

  I laughed, because I’d met Hannah Applegate at a reception in Philadelphia, and it took no effort at all to imagine her saying those words in her lazy Western drawl. Then the implications sank in. “They turned down a World Bank loan?”

  “Of course. You know as well as I do that the only reason the World Bank makes those is to force countries to stay plugged into the global economy, so they can get the hard currency they need to make payments on the loan. The Missouri government knows that, too, and they’re sick of it. We’re Missouri’s number one trading partner these days, we’ve both got the necessary arrangements in place to handle trade and investment in each other’s currencies, and a fair amount of private investment from our side heads over there these days, so they decided it was time to take the risk and tell the World Bank to get lost.”

  “Good timing on their part,” I said, thinking of the war.

  “And on ours.” In response to my questioning look: “They produce things we need and buy things we produce. The last thing we want is to see them bled dry.”

  “The way my country will be,” I said. She glanced at me, said nothing, and concentrated for a while on her bowl of soup.

  The waitress showed up conveniently a moment later, served us our entrees, made a little friendly conversation—Melanie was a regular, I gathered—and then headed off to another table. “As I said,” Melanie said then, “it’s a potentially uncomfortable subject.”

  “Given that your country is set up to weather this latest mess in fairly good shape, and mine might just end up as a failed state, yes.”

  Her face tensed, and after a moment she nodded. “If that happens, and you can make it to our border, have the border guards contact Meeker’s office. It shouldn’t be too hard to expedite your entry. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but...” She let the sentence trickle off.

  “Thank you. I hope it doesn’t either.” Then: “To the extent that you can tell me, how bad do your analysts expect it to get?”

  She considered that. “I can tell you a few things. It’s nothing you won’t hear from your own intelligence people once you get back home—the NIS, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “What do you call your spook shop here in Lakeland?”

  “We’ve got three of them: the Office of Political Intelligence in the State Department, the Office of Economic Intelligence in Commerce, and the Office of Military Intelligence in Defense. Keeping it broken up like that helps prevent groupthink.”

  I motioned with my fork, granting the point, and she went on. “What OPI says is that Texas and the Confederacy were both in deep trouble even before this whole thing blew up in their faces. They both depend heavily on oil revenue to balance their budgets, they’ve both had declining production for years now, and you know as well as I do how badly they’ve been clobbered by these latest rounds of volatility in the oil markets. That’s ultimately what’s behind this war—neither country can afford to compromise because they both need every drop of oil they can possibly get—but this is going to take a lot of wells out of production until the fighting’s over.”

  “Or permanently,” I said. In response to her questioning look: “I was told off the record that a lot of both sides’ offshore fields are stripper wells, and so a lot of the destroyed platforms won’t produce enough oil in the future to be worth the cost of rebuilding.”

  She nodded. “That’s OEI’s bailiwick and I haven’t talked to them yet, so thanks for the heads up. Even without that, though, both countries are going to be hit hard even if the war ends in a few days—and it doesn’t look like it’s going to end in a few days.”

  I nodded. “Military intelligence?”

  “Got it.”

  I didn’t ask for details; she’d told me as much as she was cleared to pass on, and there are lines you don’t cross in our business. Pretty clearly she’d attended a classified military briefing and gotten the latest information about the war, and I could think of at least a dozen signs that would warn the Lakeland government that neither Texas nor the Confederacy was going to back down any time soon. In a couple of days I’d be back in Philadelphia, and I could ask people I knew in Ellen Montrose’s transition team for a summary.

  “And if it drags on?” I asked.

  She gave me an unhappy look. “Best case scenario is both countries end up economic basket cases, with per capita GDPs lower than the midrange for sub-Saharan Africa, but they both manage to hold together and begin to recover in about a decade. Worst case scenario is that one or both go failed-state on us. Either way we’re looking at a big refugee problem, and a long-term economic headache if the Mississippi stays closed. We can deal with it, no question—it’s just going to take some work. It’s the people down south, in both countries, I feel sorry for”

  We both concentrated on our meals for a minute or two.

  “And the thing is,” she burst out then, “this whole business is so unnecessary. If both countries weren’t stuck on a treadmill trying to—” She stopped cold, catching herself.

  “Trying to progress,” I finished the sentence.

  Another unhappy look. “I really don’t think we should go there,” she said.

  “I think we should,” I replied “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the things you said Friday evening, and you were right.”

  She was so surprised she dropped her fork. After a moment: “I’m sorry. I’m not sure I believe I just heard you say that.”

  “You were right,” I repeated. “I spent all Saturday trying to find holes in your logic, and I couldn’t find any.” I shrugged. “I have no idea where to go with that yet, but there it is.” Which was not quite true, but there were things I wasn’t going to say in a restaurant that close to Embassy Row.

  She considered me for a long moment, pretty obviously shaken good and hard, and I said, “Come on. I
can’t be the only person from outside who’s told you that.”

  “It happens,” she said then. “Once in a blue moon, maybe. No, that’s not fair—working class people get it in a heartbeat, more often than not. They look at the way factory workers and store clerks live here, compared to how they live outside, they ask a few questions about why we do what we do, and they have no trouble at all figuring out the rest for themselves.”

  I thought about the family of immigrants I’d seen on the train from Pittsburgh, and the conversation I’d had with the father of the family. “But people who are well off, well educated, part of the system.”

  “The minority that still thinks that it gets some benefit out of progress,” she said.

  That stung, but I knew she was right. “Yes.”

  “Once in a blue moon.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while. Our plates got empty and our drinks got refilled; a couple of dishes of baklava came out for dessert, and when we started talking again it was about uncontroversial things, the Toledo Opera’s future plans, funny stories about trade negotiations, that sort of thing. I guessed that she was still trying to process what I’d said, which was reasonable; so was I.

  Finally the meal ended. She was looking really tired by that point—no surprises there—so we settled pretty much right away that nobody was going to end up in anybody else’s bed that night. I gave her a kiss, helped her into her coat, and got her onto a taxi. My hotel wasn’t too many blocks away, so I waited until the taxi had turned the corner and set off on foot.