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So she worked on soil acquisition for Terminator, advising the Mercurial traders on the commodities market, and one day she was able to go to the Mercury House in Manhattan and say, “We’ve got all the inoculants. We can go home.”

She went to Quito and took the space elevator up to its anchor rock, feeling balked and defeated, invaded and tossed aside. She brooded through repeat performances of
Satyagraha—
ascending with its final notes, simply the eight rising notes of an octave repeated over and over. She sang along with the rest of the audience, wondering what Gandhi would do about this, what he would say. “The very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of Satyagraha.” Thus Gandhi in the program notes.
Satya
, truth, love;
agraha
, firmness, force. He had made the word up. Tolstoy, Gandhi, the opera’s Future Man: they all sang of hope and peace, of the way to peace, satyagraha itself. The Satyagrahi were the people who enacted satyagraha. “Forgiveness is the ornament of the brave.”

As the Earth slowly receded below her, becoming the familiar blue-and-white ball, chunking space with its marbled glory, she listened to the Sanskrit lyrics bouncing in her ear. She asked Pauline to translate one haunting turn in the melody; Pauline said, “Until there is peace, we will never be safe.”

It’s too hard, there isn’t time, someone might laugh;

To protect one’s family, to protect one’s honor, one’s children;

Kin selection; bad seed;

Original sin, intrinsic evil, fortune, luck, destiny, fate;

Sloth, avarice, envy, malice, jealousy, anger, rage, revenge;

For the hell of it

Because someone else might be taking advantage

Because

No one knows for sure

It doesn’t make any difference

It’s written in the stars

No one told us not to

We can get away with it

There’s no such thing as utopia

It probably wouldn’t work anyway

It might make some money

There isn’t enough for everyone

People don’t appreciate what you do for them

They don’t deserve it

They’re lazy

They aren’t like us

They’d do the same to you if they could

P
luto and Charon are a double-planet system, tidally locked to each other like two ends of a dumbbell, same sides always facing each other, and their center of gravity out there between them. They rotate out of the plane of their orbit around the sun, and their days are a bit over six days long, with their years 248 years long. Pluto is ten K colder than it would be if it didn’t have its atmosphere, which in freezing at apogee and subliming at perigee creates a reverse greenhouse effect and cools the surface. The atmosphere is as thick as Mars’s original atmosphere, around seven millibars—in other words, not very thick. Surface temperature is forty K.

Charon, half the size of Pluto, has a surface temperature of fifty K. The next closest moon-to-planet size ratio is Luna to Earth, with Luna one-fourth the size of Earth. Pluto has a 2,300-kilometer diameter; Charon, 1,200 kilometers. Both have rock cores and mostly water ice shells.

Two much smaller moons orbit the bigger pair: Nix and Hydra, at 90 and 110 kilometers in diameter. Nix, at 80,000,000,000,000,000,000 (eighty quintillion) kilograms, mostly ice with some rock, is currently being disassembled and processed into four starships, which are to be sent roughly as a group, though the first is scheduled to go ahead, in part to test the systems being built. The interiors of the starships are typical terrarium cylinders, spinning to create an interior gravity effect. They are being
stocked with a very large number of species, spanning several biomes. The four ships are intended to stay in contact, and will reduce the genetic impacts of their islanding by occasional exchanges. The engines installed in the sterns will combine mass drivers with antimatter plasmas to run for a century, followed by a powerful Orion pusher plate, eventually reaching speeds at which ramjets will work, and these will be deployed in their turn. All together these engines will accelerate them to 2 percent the speed of light, a truly fantastic speed for a human craft, thus reducing their trip time to only two thousand years. For the stars are far away. And the nearest ones to us have no Earthlike planets.

Sorry, but it’s true. It has to be said: the stars exist beyond human time, beyond human reach. We live in the little pearl of warmth surrounding our star; outside it lies a vastness beyond comprehension. The solar system is our one and only home. Even to reach the nearest star at our best speed would take a human lifetime or more. We say “four light-years” and those words “four” and “years” fool us; we have little grasp of how far light travels in a year. Step back and think about 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second—whichever you think you can grasp better. Think of that speed as traversing 671 million miles in every hour. Think about it traversing 173 astronomical units a day; an astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, thus 93 million miles—crossed 173 times in a day. Then think about four years of days like that. That gets light to the nearest star. But we can propel ourselves to only a few percent of the speed of light; so at 2 percent of the speed of light (ten million miles an hour!) it will take about two hundred years to go those four light-years. And the first stars with Earthlike planets are more like twenty light-years away.

It takes a hundred thousand years for light to cross the Milky Way. At 2 percent of that speed—our speed, let us say—five million years.

The light from the Andromeda Galaxy took 2.5 million years to cross the gap to our galaxy. And in the universe at large, Andromeda is a very nearby galaxy. It resides in the little sphere that is our sector of the cosmos, a neighbor galaxy to ours.

So. Our little pearl of warmth, our spinning orrery of lives, our island, our beloved solar system, our hearth and home, tight and burnished in the warmth of the sun—and then—these starships we are making out of Nix. We will send them to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again.

S
wan accompanied the inoculants back to Mercury in the first transport available, which was a terrarium only partly finished. At the moment it was impossible to tell what it would become, as it was an empty cylinder of air with rock walls, a sunline, and a spindly jungle gym of framing struts, bolted onto concrete plugs in the raw rock of the interior wall. Swan stared at the people around her in the immense steel frame of the skyscraper, none of them known to her, and realized it had been a mistake to take this flight—not as bad as the blackliner, but bad. On the other hand, considerations of convenience seemed trivial to her now. She walked up flight after flight of metal stairs to get onto the open rooftop of the skyscraper, which was almost touching the sunline. From the low-g roof she could look down—out—up. Everywhere it was a heavily shadowed cylindrical space, crisscrossed with struts, floored by bare rock. The building was like a single lit corner in a castle of sublime immensity; the ground at the foot of the skyscraper was several kilometers below, the ground on the far side of the sunline only a bit farther away. A Gothic ruin, with some poor mice people huddled around the warmth of a final candle. It had not been like this in the early days, when a newly hollowed cylinder was the very shape and image of possibility. That her youth had come to this—that the whole of civilization was really something like this, badly planned, incomplete—

Swan hooked her elbows over the rail to get some stability in the low g. She put her chin on her crossed hands and, still regarding the scene, said, “Pauline, tell me about revolution.”

“At what length?”

“Go on for a short while.”

“ ‘Revolution,’ from the Latin
revolutio
, ‘a turn around.’ Refers often to a quick change in political power, frequently achieved by violent means. Connotation of a successful class-based revolt from below.”

“Causes?”

“Causes for revolution are attributed sometimes to psychological factors, like unhappiness and frustration; sometimes to sociological factors, especially a systemic standing inequity in distribution of physical and cultural goods; or to biological factors, in that groups will fight over allocation of limited necessities.”

“Aren’t these different aspects of the same thing?” Swan said.

“It is a multidisciplinary field.”

“Give me some examples,” Swan said. “Name the most famous.”

“The English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Taiping Rebellion, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, the Martian Revolution, the revolt of the Saturn League—”

“Stop,” Swan said. “Tell me why they happen.”

“Studies have failed to explain why they happen. There are no historical laws. Rapid shifts of political power have occurred without violence, suggesting that revolution, reform, and repression are all descriptors too broad in definition to aid in causal analyses.”

“Come on,” Swan objected. “Don’t be chicken! Someone has to have said something you can quote. Or even try thinking for yourself!”

“That’s hard, given your insufficient programming. You sound like you are interested in what some have called the ‘great revolutions,’ because of their major transformations of economic power,
social structures, and political changes, especially constitutional changes. Or perhaps you are interested in social revolutions, referring to massive changes in a society’s worldview and technology. Thus for instance the Upper Paleolithic revolution, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the sexual revolution, the biotech revolution, the Accelerando as a confluence of revolutions, the space diaspora, the gender revolution, the longevity revolution, and so on.”

“Indeed. What about success? Can you list necessary and sufficient conditions for a revolution to succeed?”

“Historical events are usually too overdetermined to describe in the causal terminology from logic that you enter into when you use the phrase ‘necessary and sufficient.’ ”

“But try.”

“Historians speak of critical masses of popular frustration, weakened central authority, loss of hegemony—”

“Meaning?”

“ ‘Hegemony’ means one group dominating others without exerting sheer force, something more like a paradigm that creates unnoticed consent to a hierarchy of power. If the paradigm comes to be questioned, especially in situations of material want, loss of hegemony can occur nonlinearly, starting revolutions so rapid there is not time for more than symbolic violence, as in the 1989 velvet, quiet, silk, and singing revolutions.”

“There was a singing revolution?”

“The Baltic states Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania called their 1989 withdrawal from the Soviet Union the singing revolutions, referring to the behavior of the demonstrators in the city plazas. That brings up a point: people in physical masses seem to matter. If enough of the population takes to the streets in mass demonstrations, governments have no good defense. ‘They must dismiss the people and elect another one,’ as Brecht said. That being impossible, they often fall. Or a civil war begins.”

“Surely the literature on revolutions can’t be this superficial,” Swan said. “You’re just quoting random stuff! You have a mind like the rings of Saturn, a million miles wide and an inch deep.”

“Catachresis and antiquated measurement units indicate irony or sarcasm. Coming from you, probably sarcasm—”

“She said sarcastically! You search engine you.”

“A quantum walk is a random walk by definition. Please upgrade my program anytime you feel you can. I’ve heard Wang’s other algorithm is good. Some principles of generalization would be useful.”

“Go on about reasons revolutions happen.”

“People adhere to ideas that explain and offer psychological compensation for their position in the class system of their time. People either increase their sense of dispossession by clarifying it, or they try to dismiss it as unimportant because of an ideology that justifies their dispossession as part of a larger project. People thus very often act against their own interests as the result of ideologies they hold which justify their subalternity to themselves. Denial and hope both play a hand in this. These compensatory ideologies are part of the hegemonic influence over subject peoples in an imperial situation. It happens in all class systems, meaning all cultures in recorded history, since the first agrarian and urban civilizations.”

“They’ve all been class systems?”

“There might have been classless societies before the Neolithic agricultural revolution, but the record makes our understanding of those cultures very speculative. All we can say for sure is that in the post–ice age agricultural revolution, which was one of those more general revolutions that took perhaps a thousand years, a division into classes was institutionalized as a state power apparatus. All over the world, and independent of others, there emerged a four-level division into priests, warriors, artisans, and farmers. Often they were all under the rule of what everyone agreed was a
sacred monarch, a king that was also a god. This was very useful for the priest and warrior classes, and for the power of men over women and children.”

“So, never a classless society.”

“Supposedly classless societies have been instituted after certain revolutions, but there are usually leaders in these that quickly form a new ruling class, and the various social roles taken by citizens of the post-revolutionary state revert to classes because of differential value given to different social roles, leading to a new hierarchy being constructed fairly rapidly, usually within five years.”

“So
all
cultures in history have had class systems.”