Retrotopia

by John Michael Greer

  The sky was still clear and a rising wind swept down the streets, hissing in the bare branches of streetside trees. Overhead the stars glittered, and now and then something bright shot across some portion of the sky and burnt out, one more fragment of business as usual falling out of the place we’d stuck it and thought it would stay forever.

  In less than forty-eight hours I’d be back in the Atlantic Republic: on my way home to Philadelphia, where three decades of one-party rule by the Dem-Reps had just gone out the window in a landslide and taken the status quo with it. The new administration would have to scramble to find its feet in a world gone topsy-turvy, where there were too many hard questions and nothing like enough straightforward answers. For that matter. I was going to have to face hard questions of my own, and I was far from sure I had any straightforward answers, either.

  Another bit of dead satellite traced a streak of light across the sky, dissolved in a flurry of sparks. I kept on walking.

  ELEVEN

  The next morning I was up early, and walked to Kaufer’s News while the sky was still that vague gray color that won’t tell you yet whether it’s clear or overcast. The Blade had done the smart thing and printed extra copies of the morning paper—the stack in the bin was almost as tall as I was—and I watched three other people buy copies as I walked up the street to the newsstand. The Lakeland Republic flag snapped in a brisk wind from the flagpole out in front of the Capitol, and lights already burned in the windows. The Republic’s government had a long day ahead of it, and so did I.

  Back in the hotel, I settled down in a chair and spent a few minutes checking the news. Most of the front section was about the war down south, of course; both sides’ naval forces were still duking it out with long-range missiles, and the Confederate advance toward Dallas-Fort Worth had begun to slow as Texan forces reached the war zone and flung themselves into the struggle. The presidents of Missouri, New England, East and West Canada, and Quebec had joined Meeker in calling for an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement of the dispute over the Gulf oil fields; back home, outgoing President Barfield and president-elect Montrose would be holding a joint press conference later that day to announce something of the same sort. That last story made my eyebrows go up. The Dem-Reps had been sore losers in a big way since their landslide defeat a few weeks back; if Barlow had loosened up enough to appear on a stage with his replacement, things might have shifted, and not in a bad way.

  There was more—another attempt at a ceasefire in the Californian civil war, another report by an international panel on the worsening phosphate shortage, another recap of the satellite situation that ran through a roster of collisions, and estimated that the world had less than three months left before all satellite services in the midrange orbits were out of commission—but I folded the paper after a glance at each of those and tossed it on the desk. I had a little over a day left to spend in the Lakeland Republic before catching the train back home, and most of that was already spoken for. Between talking to Marjorie Vanich at the university and Janice Mikkelson in her mansion, I had decisions to make that would affect the lives of a lot of people I’d never meet.

  You learn to get used to that if you’re in politics, but if you get too used to it you land in trouble really fast. Half the reason the Dem-Reps got clobbered in our elections a few weeks back is that they’d gotten into the habit of thinking that the only people who mattered politically were the people who had the money and connections to show up at fundraisers and get their interests represented by lobbyists—and much more than half the reason why Montrose’s New Alliance swept the legislative races and put her into the presidency with the strongest mandate in a generation was that she’d had the sense to look past the lobbyists and fundraising dinners, and reach out to everyone whose interests had been ignored for the last thirty years. I’d played a part in that strategy, and the choices ahead of me might also play a certain part in determining whether Montrose’s victory would turn out to be a long-term gamechanger or a flash in the pan.

  So I sat there in my room for a few more minutes, then called Professor Vanich to confirm our appointment and headed out to the street. A few minutes later I was tucked into the cab of a two-wheel taxi, heading northwest from the Capitol district through one mostly residential neighborhood after another. I’d gotten used to Lakeland habits by then, and so it didn’t surprise me that the houses looked sturdy and old-fashioned, with flower beds out front that would be blazing with color come spring; that trees were everywhere; that there were corner shops all over and little retail districts at intervals, close enough that people could walk to do most of their everyday shopping; that the schools didn’t look like prisons, the libraries didn’t look like prisons—in fact, I passed something I’m pretty sure was the county jail and even that didn’t look like a prison.

  The houses got bigger as we went further from the Maumee River. None of the trees looked more than thirty years old—I recalled from some half-forgotten history vid that there was a major battle west of Toledo during the Second Civil War—and all the houses looked better than a century older than that, even though I knew they were all recent construction. I looked at them and mulled over everything else I’d seen over the last two weeks.

  Finally the buildings of the university came into sight, and I had to remind myself that they were just as new as the houses. They were all built of white stone, with the sort of university Gothic look you see in the few places where colleges and universities managed to dodge the architectural fads of the late twentieth century and the bombs and missiles of the early twenty-first, and the trees and lawns and brick walkways reminded me of universities I’d seen in history vids. Back home, if you visit one of the universities that hasn’t scrapped teaching altogether and turned into a sports team franchise pure and simple, you’re going to find a ten- to twenty-story glass and steel structure where a couple of thousand students at a time file into big auditoriums to watch prerecorded lectures. One look at the buildings suggested that that wasn’t the way things were done here.

  The cab let me off at a midsized white building with a sign that said RITTER PLANETARIUM. It took me a couple of tries to find the right door, but finally I got into the office and classroom part of the building, followed the directions I’d gotten from Fred Vanich, and eventually found my way to Dr. Marjorie Vanich’s office, a pleasant little space with shelves practically creaking under the weight of big hardback books.

  “Yes, Fred told me about your conversation,” she said when we’d finished saying the usual polite things. She had thick glasses and a mop of mostly gray hair, and typical Lakeland clothing, a hempcloth blouse and a brown woolen jacket and skirt that had probably seen years of wear. “He mentioned you were interested in the satellite situation—I’d be happy to discuss that, since it’s been a major research project of mine for close to twenty years now.”

  “I’m definitely interested in that,” I said, “but also in the university system here generally—and I’ve got one simple practical question.” In response to her raised eyebrows: “How on earth do you calculate satellite orbits without computers?”

  That got a sudden smile, and it wasn’t the usual Lakeland you-don’t-get-it smile, either. “That’s something we’re really proud of,” Dr. Vanich said. “I can demonstrate that once I’ve fielded your questions about Toledo University and our universities here in Lakeland generally.”

  It didn’t take many questions on my part to get her talking enthusiastically about the university system, and she didn’t mind at all that I pulled out my notebook and started jotting down details. The short version was that the Lakeland Republic, like everyone else, had its higher education system flattened by the Second Civil War, but they’d gone about rebuilding it in a completely different way.

  “One of the big problems of higher education back before the war,” she explained, “was that the universities tried to turn themselves into trade schools for every possible profession. Want to be a pol
ice officer? Get a criminal justice degree. Want to be a practical nurse? Get a nursing degree. Want to be a garbage collector? Get a waste stream management degree—and yes, there were institutions offering that last one before things finally fell apart.

  “So when the fighting was over and the Republic needed people to do every kind of skilled and unskilled job you care to name, an assortment of former university administrators got together and drew up a grandiose plan to build hundreds of new universities, and train tens of thousands of new professors, so that after a decade or two they could start turning out graduates in all the necessary job categories. The provisional legislature told them that the country couldn’t afford to wait for a decade or two, they insisted that there wasn’t an alternative—and then the Restos came up with a better alternative.”

  “The apprenticeship programs,” I said.

  That got me exactly the look you’d expect a teacher to give a bright student. “Exactly, Mr. Carr. The Restos knew that most teachers, lawyers, physicians, engineers, and the like were educated by apprenticeship in the nineteenth century, so they brought out a plan to do the same thing, and of course it was adopted. The university people kept insisting that their plan was better, but before long it became clear to everyone else that apprenticeship really was the best way to go for most of those things—and that’s when a group of professors who’d taught at prewar colleges went to the legislature with a proposal of their own.

  “Their proposal took the same tack the Restos’ did. Back in the nineteenth century, you see, universities weren’t saddled with the kind of huge overpaid administrative staff they got in the second half of the twentieth, and they didn’t try to teach everything under the sun. They were mostly run by faculty senates and taught the scholarly disciplines, along with advanced degrees for specialists in medicine and law. So the professors drew up a proposal to relaunch higher education in the Lakeland Republic on that basis, they got the Restos on board with it, and the result was the higher education system we’ve got now.”

  I nodded. “That makes sense. How much does it cost for an average bachelor’s degree?”

  “In terms of cost to the student? Not a cent.” At my surprise, she smiled. “Entrance is by competitive examination, and if you qualify for admission and keep your grades above a C minus, tuition is free. We treat higher education as a public utility; it’s not that much of a tax burden because none of the universities admit that many students—the last thing any country needs is a couple of million people with degrees they’ll never be able to use.”

  “Don’t you think there’s something to be gained by general education?”

  “Of course! We also run public education classes, mostly nights and weekends, that are open to anyone. I teach astronomy classes here two nights a week, and run weekend trips to the university’s observatory in Defiance County—it’s tier one, so there are no streetlights and very few other sources of light pollution at all, and we’ve got a new eighty-inch Newtonian reflector that gives just stunning views of the sky. You’ve never seen what wonder looks like until you watch a class full of ten-year-olds get their first look at the rings of Saturn.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  “Now, as far as the satellite situation goes, probably the best place to start is with this.” She opened a desk drawer, pulled out something that looked like a complicated ruler with a long strip down the middle that slid. “I don’t imagine you’ve seen one of these before, but the rockets that put human bootprints on the moon were designed using them. It’s called a slide rule—think of it as a pocket calculator with no buttons. This one has scales for spherical trigonometry, since that’s the branch of math we use for orbital calculations.”

  Two books came down from a bookshelf and joined the slide rule on the desk. “This one’s got trigonometric tables, and this one’s something we worked up here at U of Toledo, a set of orbital tables that factor in Earth’s gravity and diameter. With these three things and the places and times from two clear observations of an orbiting object, you can work out its orbital parameters in about twenty minutes.”

  “Without a computer,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Without a computer. The mechanics of orbiting objects were worked out back in the seventeenth century, and the equations we use to calculate orbital parameters were invented by Gauss in 1801. For the last thirty years, we’ve been refining our methods so that we can track any satellite or satellite fragment and predict its position as far into the future as we want. It’s been a great program, but it’ll be shut down at the end of this school year.”

  I gave her a startled look. “Why are you doing that?”

  “Because the space age is over.”

  For a moment the silence was deep enough that I could just faintly hear the sounds of traffic on the far side of the windows. “Manned space flight was never really more than a stunt,” Dr. Vanich said then, “and the notion of putting colonies on other worlds went away once scientists found out that Earth is the only habitable body in the solar system with a magnetic field strong enough to keep off the radiation from the Sun. A trip from here to Mars and back amounts to a death sentence from radiation poisoning, you know.”

  “I’d heard that,” I admitted.

  “That left satellites, which do pay for themselves. The problem there, of course, was that nobody took the time to think about what was going to happen if we just kept on launching volleys of satellites every year into the same finite set of orbits. Even after the Kessler syndrome in low earth orbit kicked off in ‘29, too many people and too many governments insisted that there was no alternative to an ever increasing load of satellites in the remaining orbits—and here we are.” She glanced at me. “I cowrote a paper for Nature in ‘51, suggesting that it was past time for an international agreement to ration access to orbital space. You might find it educational to look up the dismissive responses I got. They were all variations on the theme of ‘they’ll think of something.’ I never did find out who ‘they’ were, but somehow ‘they’ never did.”

  I pondered that. “The paper this morning said that the midrange orbits won’t be free of debris again for some appalling length of time,” I said.

  “We did a series of estimates based on different initial assumptions. The average worked out to just over twelve hundred years, with a standard deviation of three hundred eighty years. The low earth orbits will be usable again in two to four hundred years, we’ve calculated.”

  “And the high geosynchronous orbits?”

  She shook her head. “Probably not within the lifetime of our species.”

  I stared at her for a good long moment.

  “That didn’t have to happen,” Dr. Vanich said. “As a species, we could have paid more attention to the future and less to immediate gratification—but we didn’t. Now certain possibilities are gone forever, and we’ll just have to live with that.” She shook her head. “I’ve cowritten another paper on that theme. It’s been submitted to Nature, too, but I haven’t yet heard whether they’re going to publish it or not.”

  I sat there trying to process it all.

  “On the off chance we’re wrong,” she said, “we’ve made sure that there are plenty of copies of our book of tables in circulation. Still, it’s a bit sad to have put so many years into something that is probably never going to be used again.”

  We talked a little more about the satellite situation, and then I excused myself and left. I had another appointment to keep, and lunch to get before I kept it; Janice Mikkelson had said something about drinks, and I didn’t want to try to deal with that on an empty stomach. Still, there was more to it than that. Even though I’d been tracking the satellite situation for years now, it had never really quite sunk in that we weren’t just talking about a temporary thing.

  Sure, I’d heard all the grand plans to use ground-based lasers and the like to knock debris out of the near-earth orbits; everybody has. Those sound really great until you tot up exactly how much elect
ricity those would need to draw to make any kind of difference, and ask where that’s going to come from, when most of the world’s industrial countries can’t reliably keep the lights on in their capital cities when the temperature spikes. I’d heard the same line Dr. Vanich had mentioned more times than I could count—“they’ll think of something” —and of course she was right; whoever “they” were, “they” hadn’t gotten around to thinking of anything that mattered.

  I laughed, then. Fortunately I was crossing part of the campus that was mostly empty and nobody heard me, because it wasn’t a pleasant laugh. It was the kind of bitter laugh that comes out when you realize the joke’s been on you all along. When Melanie said that progress had turned into the enemy of prosperity, I’d realized, she was understating the case considerably. If people hadn’t let short term interest blind them to hard realities, we wouldn’t be looking at the end of the space age, but we’d all just assumed that progress would fix everything and gone walking straight ahead into a preventable disaster.

  One more preventable disaster, I thought. On top of all the others.

  I was on the edge of campus by then, and the district of restaurants and shops you always find around a university was right in front of me. It didn’t take too long to find a place for lunch, and I took my time because my appointment with Janice Mikkelson wasn’t until two o’clock. A meatball sandwich and a green salad made a decent meal; I read through the campus paper—it was full of pieces on little intramural sports teams, but there apparently wasn’t an intercollegiate team of any kind—and then did a little window shopping at the places along the street.

  I was familiar enough with the Lakeland Republic by then that the grocery store full of fresh produce and bulk grains and beans, the butcher shop wrapping meat up in white paper parcels, and the drugstore with a soda fountain down one side and a compounding pharmacy of its own in back, didn’t surprise me at all. The record store on the corner was a bit of a shock, though, because it sold actual records: big black disks in paper sleeves meant to be played on the kind of old-fashioned record player my grandmother still had for her old opera records. I guessed that the disks weren’t actually vinyl, Lakeland resource taxes being what they were, but they looked like it. No doubt one of the Lakeland Republic’s mad scientists had gone digging through old journal articles, the way Emily Franken had found her maser, and figured out how to make something close enough out of industrial hemp or some other locally produced feedstock.