2312

Swan 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?”