“I predict if trade is established, coffee will become a luxury drink here, and tea will become a luxury drink there,” MinYan said. “With the additional cost of interstellar shipping, each will become the luxury drink on the other planet.”
“And a tremendous source of trade that will be,” ChaoLi said. “Together with their nanites. What counters the nanites? What’s the corresponding trade item?”
“Interstellar freight itself,” Milbank said. “It’s our ships plying that route, don’t forget.”
“Of course,” ChaoLi said. “Anything else, JieMin?”
“One other thing so far. They have more usage of autodrive cars and less of buses than we do. I suspect that is part and parcel of the difference in average ages.”
ChaoLi nodded.
“That makes sense, too,” she said. “Anything else so far?”
ChaoLi scanned the other attendees.
“All right. Good work, everybody. I’ll watch for your written reports. And the Earthsea information ought to be available to your groups tomorrow or the next day.”
MinChao and Jessica talked about the Amber findings after they had a chance to read the written reports ChaoLi sent on to them.
“Coffee. Can you imagine?” MinChao said in a tone approaching disgust.
“Well, it was the drink of choice in many Earth cultures, if not the eastern ones,” Jessica said. “There has to be some attraction to it. I wonder what a good cup of coffee would taste like.”
“Not like any we have here, that’s for sure. And a nudity taboo, if not an outright statutory ban?”
“There we are the outlier, I think. We may find no other colony planet with our attitudes on that subject. From JieMin’s analysis, it may be an outgrowth of the Kendall regime and its overthrow. Most human cultures have had similar taboos.”
MinChao snorted.
“It seems primitive to me,” he said. “A cultural taboo.”
“They will probably consider nudity acceptance primitive. Historically, the human cultures without a nudity taboo, like the Australian aborigines, were decidedly primitive.”
MinChao nodded.
“That’s all the minor stuff, though,” he said. “The medical nanites is something else entirely.”
“Agreed. That is definitely a technology – or at least a product – we want to purchase. There the failure of the Kendall regime hurt us badly. We started out fifty years behind. More, if you consider what we lost and had to regain, such as the education losses due to lack of communicators for our young people.”
“Yes, those bastards really hurt us there. Well, hopefully Rob can negotiate a trade deal that works for everybody.”
“I hope so. I wonder who he will send.”
“Send?”
“He can’t go on a months-long expedition to Amber. He’s going to have to send someone to negotiate the deal. I hope he has someone up to the task.”
In his office downtown, Prime Minster Milbank was considering the same question.
About Earthsea
The Earthsea data stream package came in the next day, and the three groups all had the same assignments as before.
When JieMin started to analyze the data – looking, as he had before with the Amber data, at all the pictures – he noticed he was getting multiple copies of each picture. As many as a dozen or more copies. Clicking through to the articles, again they were exact copies, and with the same timestamp.
That explained why the Earthsea data stream package was so much bigger than the Amber one. What JieMin could not explain was the reason for multiple transmission of the same data.
On Arcadia, most radio traffic was to and from the big antenna farm on the administration building downtown. Radio contact to the far locations of the colony was line-of-sight, sometimes to a low peak on the horizon. Even in Chagu, they had direct communication to Arcadia City from a low peak whose summit was visible from both locations.
When farther cities were established, the colony was far enough along to send up a communications satellite as a repeater for those distant cities, all of whom were in the same hemisphere.
Amber had apparently taken a similar path.
Why had Earthsea not done the same?
JieMin set the big computer at the university to de-duping the Earthsea data stream, and posted a note on the shared scratch space for Earthsea that the process was under way.
Meanwhile, JieMin went back to scanning pictures. While he scanned, he was keeping an eye out for one thing in particular: a map of the colony. Maybe there was something specific about Earthsea that encouraged the multiple transmissions.
Darius Mikena was looking at the political aspects of Earthsea. What was their government like? He noted the multiple copies of most things in the data stream package, but found it no more than a curiosity.
Earthsea had a wildly different government than Amber or Arcadia. The planetary government ruling body was a council with a rotating chairmanship. This was not the council that had been established with the founding of the colony, however. Those council members had been the heads of various subject areas of the colony – food, housing, medical, and the like.
On Earthsea, the council was composed of representatives from the various city-states into which the colony was divided. Their votes were multiplied by the number of people in each city-state before being tallied, so it was still a democracy, if a weirdly structured one.
The chairman of the council was not the executive, however. The executive, called the Director, was elected by the council and ruled for ten years, absent the council voting to relieve him. His powers were very limited, as most government powers were retained by the city-states.
It seemed a bizarre arrangement for a colony to Mikena, but it was his job to write a description, not a critique.
MinYan’s group was also working through the data on Earthsea. They also noticed the duplicate messages, but thought nothing of it. Some artifact of the data collection.
Their analysis of the business and economic aspects was something else again. Unlike Arcadia, the city-states of Earthsea all had manufacturing economies. On Arcadia, manufacturing was centered south of Arcadia City, where the metafactories built new factories for manufacturing.
What did they do on Earthsea? Transport metafactories somehow? How?
They also noticed the Earthsea economy had a larger transportation sector than Amber or Arcadia did, though it was focused on shuttles as opposed to trucks and buses. Also barges, which Arcadia used to ship things, especially bulk commodities to cities up and down the coast. But much smaller truck and bus segments.
One final thing they noted. Earthsea had some companies for which Arcadia had no analog. It was a segment of the communications industry. Earthsea had no satellite communications sector. Instead, they had some other sector that manufactured long-distance radios.
JieMin was keeping up with the other groups’ findings on the shared scratch space in between scanning millions of images himself. Then he found it in the data stream. A map of the colony.
The map was intended to show the extent of a couple of wildfires in the mountains, but it showed the whole colony on a sort of three-dimensional map. JieMin gasped when he saw it.
The colony was built into niches in a huge mountain range. Here a city, there a city, wherever you could fit one.
As for the capital, imagine Denver surrounded on three side by the Rockies, and bounded on the east by the ocean. The capital had grown until it filled the space it had. Other cities had taken up the growth of the colony in large parks in the mountains, like North Park or South Park in the Rockies. They, too had filled the available space.
Compare this with Arcadia. Arcadia City was bounded by the east-west chain of the Blue Mountains to the north, and by the sea to the east, but rolling hills and plains stretched away from the city on the west and south. The capital’s satellite cities dotted those plains and hills for hundreds of miles.
In contrast, all
through the mountains on Earthsea, and on coastal plains north and south, there were scattered the cities – city-states, he supposed – of the colony. With all the colonies approaching a hundred twenty-five years since settlement, they were all approaching the twenty-million population mark.
And none of the city-states of Earthsea looked to be more than about half a million people. Of necessity, some of their land area in each city-state had to be given over to growing crops. Cows could be pastured in some pretty rough country, but mechanized farming required flat fields.
The limited land area of any one location had limited the size of any one city, so they had built a lot of them.
JieMin went back over the findings of the other groups, considering them in light of what he now knew of the topography and the layout of Earthsea.
The emphasis on shuttles over trucks and buses made sense. Mountain roads through those jagged mountains would be a trick. Transportation to isolated, mountain-locked cities would be by shuttle. Or barge, in the case of cities up and down the coast, tucked into occasional coastal plains. So that made sense.
Their form of government made some sense, too, once he thought about it. Most of the decisions would be best made close to home, in the individual city-states. A common council for the colony would have limited scope, and the Director would only consider, or have authority over, colony-wide issues.
What about the distributed manufacturing? JieMin recalled something he had tripped over when scanning Earth’s colony project headquarters documents, tracking down what project information had been hidden. Something about portable factories.
JieMin ran a search, refined his search terms, ran the search again. There it was. A design for a small factory that could build a metafactory. A meta-metafactory? In any case, it could build a metafactory like Arcadia had been using for over a century, and it was transportable by shuttle.
The Earthsea colonists must have searched for some solution to their problem, and found it in the colony headquarters archives. For all JieMin knew, maybe Janice Quant had put it there just for them.
That explained how Earthsea could have distributed manufacturing, though. Have the metafactory build one of these small bootstrap factories, then lift it by shuttle to the new location. It could build a metafactory there, and you were in business. Then the bootstrap factory could be moved to another location and do it again.
JieMin would have to make sure Rob understood the implications for Arcadia. It was time and past time to spread out their manufacturing capability. They just hadn’t known how to do it, and, unlike the Earthsea colonists, had not been so motivated as to find the solution in the colony headquarters archives.
JieMin went home for the weekend with one open issue. Why no satellite communications? With those jagged mountains separating the cities of Earthsea, land-based repeating stations would have been a nightmare to install and maintain. He would have thought comm satellites would be the ultimate solution to the communications problem Earthsea’s mountains presented.
But they saw no evidence of that. Just duplicate upon duplicate of the message streams, and all with identical timestamps.
It was a quiet Sunday afternoon at home. Both ChaoPing and LeiTao, their husbands JuMing and DaGang, and their children LingTao and XiPing had been over for a big Sunday dinner about two. It was a happy, noisy crowd of eleven around the big table in the dining room.
That was over now, though, and it was the quiet after the storm. JieMin was relaxing in the big armchair in the living room when it hit him.
“Of course! A blind man could see it.”
JieMin logged into his university account in his heads-up display and searched on the colonist listing for Earthsea. And there it was.
On a lark, he did the same for Amber.
Oh, Janice Quant, you schemer.
ChaoLi had her next status meeting the next day. She knew that JieMin had had an integration Sunday late in the afternoon. She wanted to hear where everyone else was at, but she really wanted to hear what he had come up with.
Rob Milbank made his presentation of the government structure of Earthsea. As JieMin had posted the map and his conclusions about it to the common scratch space on Friday, Milbank framed his discussion of their government structure in terms of the distributed nature of the colony.
MinYan was next. She, too, framed her discussion in terms of the map, and how that had led to the reliance on shuttles and barges over trucks and buses. She also discussed their distributed manufacturing capability in terms of JieMin’s find of the plans for a bootstrap factory in the colony headquarters archives.
Then it was JieMin’s turn.
“There are two observed things we have not yet explained,” he said. “The multiple copies of all the messages, all with the same timestamps, and the lack of satellite communications. I believe I know the answer to both of those. Earthsea has developed quantum-entanglement radios.”
ChaoLi gasped, but Milbank and MinYan looked puzzled.
“Quantum what?” Milbank asked.
“Quantum entanglement radios. We have known for several centuries that if you have entangled particles – entangled on the quantum level – when you wiggle one, the other one wiggles, too, no matter how far away it is. And that interaction goes faster than the speed of light. People have been trying to make that into a zero-time-of-flight radio system since.
“I believe Earthsea has succeeded in making such a system, and uses it to bind its city-states together. The reason we see so many copies of every message is because every city-state rebroadcasts those messages on its local radio system.
“That’s why there are no communication satellites. And that’s why all the duplicate files have identical timestamps.”
“JieMin, are you sure? if so, that’s tremendously important.”
“It is the only thing that fits all the data.”
“Why is it so important, ChaoLi,” MinYan asked.
ChaoLi nodded to JieMin, and everyone looked at him.
“As I say, with quantum entangled particles, when you wiggle one, the other one wiggles, too, no matter how far away it is,” he said. “That is, it has no distance limit. Quantum entanglement radio could put all the colonies in touch with each other, over interstellar distances, with no transit time.”
Milbank and MinYan just stared at him.
That afternoon, JieMin went back to the apartment. He changed into lavalava, then went downstairs to the reception desk. The young man at the desk nodded to him and led him out into the gardens where MinChao and Jessica waited for him on the bamboo mat at the intersection of the gravel paths.
“Please, have a seat, JieMin,” MinChao said.
“Thank you, Chen Zufu.”
“We’ve read the reports from this morning’s meetings,” Jessica said. “Quantum-entanglement radio? Are you sure?”
“I have high confidence I am right, Chen Zumu. There could be another explanation, but the identical timestamps from locations on the planet so far apart is tough to explain any other way.”
Jessica nodded.
“And there is one more thing, Chen Zumu,” JieMin said. “The reason I asked to see you, actually.”
“Go ahead, JieMin,” she said.
“When I had the insight that it was quantum-entanglement radio that explained what we were seeing, on a hunch I checked the original colonist listing for Earthsea.
“Three different groups on Earth investigating quantum-entanglement, and who put their names in as colonists, were all assigned to Earthsea, the one planet where it would be most useful to have such radios.”
“Really,” MinChao said.
“Yes, Chen Zufu. Janice Quant assigned which colonists went to which planets. It was not by accident that all three of those groups ended up on Earthsea, a planet almost designed to defeat standard radio equipment. Janice Quant didn’t do anything by accident.”
“Remarkable,” Jessica said.
“Yes, but there is another data
point as well, Chen Zumu. Four different groups working on medical nanotechnology were all assigned to Amber. It would be remarkable if they had come up empty-handed with that level of expertise and interest concentrated in a single colony.”
MinChao and Jessica looked at each other, then back to JieMin.
“So what was our concentration, JieMin?” MinChao asked. “Janice Quant could not have seen you coming along, with your hyperspace vision.”
“No, Chen Zufu. And the Chen family and the Jasic group were assigned to Arcadia well before they joined forces. They did not meet until they were at the Texas shuttleport just days prior to departure from Earth.”
“Did we have a concentration, JieMin?” Jessica asked.
“I don’t know, Chen Zumu. Arcadia under the Kendall governments may not have been fertile ground for what Janice Quant planned here. Or such a plan may not have existed for every colony. Janice Quant may purposefully have left some things to chance.”
“How would that make sense, JieMin?” MinChao asked.
JieMin thought about how to explain it.
“I have seen evidence before that Janice Quant planned a lot of things, but in other ways she left some things open to chance. If you plan everything, you may get everything you planned, but anything you forgot to include could be missed.”
“So leaving some things open to chance allows an opportunity for the unforeseen,” Jessica said. “In particular, the pleasant surprise.”
“Yes, Chen Zumu. Like the Chen-Jasic alliance. Like me. Like hyperspace travel. It seems to be Janice Quant’s style to sometimes just roll the dice.
“But on Amber and Earthsea, she stacked the deck.”
The Prime Minister
After JieMin had left, MinChao and Jessica remained in the center of the garden where their conversation would not be recorded or overheard.
GALACTIC SURVEY (COLONY Book 3) Page 15