David Brin - Earth

For a brief time in the nineteen-seventies, the first and second oil crises made it seem that the new planetary kingpins would be Arab sheiks. Then, in the eighties, Japan scared the hell out of everybody. (Look it up!) Through hard work (and by adroitly catering to America’s adolescent buying frenzy) the Japanese boot-strapped themselves to economic power that held the world in awe. Everyone predicted that soon they “would own everything.”

But each of us takes our turn, it seems, driving the world economy. A new generation of Japanese, wanting more from life than endless toil and a tiny apartment, went on a new buying spree. And in the early years of this century, wasn’t it Russia — with nearly half the world’s trained engineers and newly released from two thousand years of stifling czars and commissars — who were suddenly only too glad to work hard, build to order, and sell cheap whatever the Japanese wanted? Many of you probably remember the consequence a while later, when Russian was proposed to replace Simglish as the second lingua franca. But that passed too, didn’t it?

Come on, droogs. Learn to step back and take a long view. Time will come (if the planet holds out) when even the Han will get tired of laboring themselves sick, piling money in the bank with nothing to spend it on.

Then cafe to predict where the next group of hard workers will arise? My money’s on those puritan secessionists in New England. Now those are people who know how to give an employer a good hour’s work for an hour’s wage…

No one congratulated Crat for saving his drowning crewmate. Nobody spoke much about the incident at all. Things happen , was the philosophy. So there were a few more widows back on one of the floating towns? Too bad. Life was short; what more could you say? Still, Crat apparently wasn’t a “go-suck Yankee sof-boy” anymore. There were no more sour looks at mess, or strange objects found swimming in his gruel. Silently, they moved his hammock out of the steamy hold and up to the anchor room with the others.

Only one fellow actually commented on the misadventure with the fishing net. “Jeez, Vato,” he told Crat. “I never seen no bugger hold breath so long as you!”

To Crat, who had no idea how long he’d been underwater, the remark seemed like a signal from Providence. An experience that might have turned some men away from swimming forever, instead pointed him to an unexpected talent.

The story of his life had been mediocre plainness at best, and all too often less than that. His image of himself was slow and thick as a stone. The thought of having any unusual abilities astonished Crat. And so, at the very moment he had won acceptance aboard the Congo , he renewed his vow to leave first chance — to act on his earlier loose talk about going into salvage.

Not that there was much he’d miss about this old tub. Life on a frontier didn’t offer many luxuries. Forced to live here for a week, the average American would never again complain about his own restricted water ration, which in some states topped a lavish hundred gallons a week.

Or take another necessity — Data-Net privileges. Here you simply didn’t have them.

Crat used to despise old folks back in Indiana for relying on so many electronic crutches… globe-spanning access to news on every topic, to every library, to every dumpit research journal even, instantly translated from any obscure language for mere pennies. Then there were the hobby lines, special interest groups, net-zines, three-vee shows.

Until emigrating, Crat never realized how much he depended on all that, too. Aboard Congo , though, they had this strange, once-a-day ritual — mail call. Each man answered if his name was shouted, and swapped a black cube with the bosun. You were allowed to pipe two message blips, no more than fifty words each, through the ship’s single antenna, ruled dictatorially by the comm officer, a one-eyed, one-legged victim of some past oceanic catastrophe, whom everybody, even the captain, treated with utter deference.

Standing in line, waiting humbly for your miserable blips, was almost as humiliating as evening vitamin call, when a bored U.N. nurse doled each man his pressed capsule of “Nutritional Aid” — the sum total of the world’s sense of obligation to the pariah state of refugees. No wonder the great powers were even less generous with the world’s true lifeblood, information.

Now and then, during mail call, Crat caught himself wondering why Remi and Roland never wrote to him. Then he remembered with a sudden jerk. They’re dead. I’m the last. Last of the Quayle High Settlers .

Strange. Believing he was destined for a short life, Crat had long ago decided to live one with no compromises. He’d always been the one getting into jams, which his friends always reliably, sensibly got him out of.

Now Remi and Roland were gone, while he still lived. Who could figure it?

Roland, for some reason, had willed Crat his bank balance, augmented by a hero’s bonus. There was supposed to be a medal, too. It was probably still out there somewhere, following him around the world in the unreliable tangle of real-matter post. As for Roland’s money… Crat had blown it all in card games and buying rounds of drinks to his friends’ memory. But he did want the medal.

After mail call, off-duty crew retired to the aft deck, where three enterprising Annamese sold a pungent home brew from clay pots. While the flotilla sailed southward from the debacle with the green raiders, Crat discovered he could now stomach the foul-smelling beer. It was a milestone that showed he was adapting.

The evening was dark, with a heavy overcast cutting off most of the stars. A pearly opalescence in the west became a blaze whenever the clouds parted briefly to spill moonlight across the smooth water.

At the fantail, two sets of meditators seemed to square off for a silent, contemplative showdown. Sufis on the portside and neo-Zen adepts to starboard. Beginners in both groups were wired to brain-wave monitors the size of thimbles, which led to earplug button speakers. Using identical, inexpensive techno-aids, each side nevertheless claimed it was true tradition, while the other taught mere dazing. Whatever. Like the majority of the crew, Crat preferred more honest, traditional forms of intoxication.

“… Commodore bloody misreads his charts—” someone said in the darkness beyond the rear hatch. “That El Nino thing… It’s’pozed drive all them fish over here Wes’ Pacific side, every ten-’leven year so. But bloody dammit commodore, he miss them sure.”

“It come more often than every ten year now, I hear,” someone else replied. Idly, Crat wondered who they were. Their English was better than average for this barge.

“Dey got de eco-loggy all fucked sure,” said someone with a Caribbean accent. “Evryt’ing all change. So I say don’t listen to UNEPA bastards, not at all. Dey don’ know no’t’ing better than we do.”

Someone else agreed. “Ach, UNEPA. They wants us dead, just like greeners do, ’cause we mess up they stinking planet. Might catch wrong type dumpit fish. Ooh, bad thing! So better we just die . Maybe put something in vitamins. Do us cheap an’ quiet.”

That was the steady gossip of course, even when Sea State chemists — university-trained men and women from lands now drowned under the rising tides — went from boat to boat reassuring crews and urging them to take the pills, rumors nevertheless spread like viruses. Crat himself sometimes wondered. His tiredness no doubt came mostly from hard work. That probably also explained the low ebb of his sex drive. But if he ever did find out somebody was slipping something into the food…