The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Then the drones spoke together, first in Oshiwambo, then Afrikaans, Swahili, English, Chinese, other languages I couldn’t name.

  “We are from the African Union Peace and Security Council. This mine has been nationalized by the new Namibian government, and will be protected from now on by AFRIPOL security forces. All countries of the African Union are now united in support of the Africa for Africans program. Representatives from the Namibian government and the AU will arrive shortly to help you with this transition. Please stay seated, or feel free to move into the dining halls or dormitories while the armed personnel here are escorted off the premises.”

  Which we were happy to do. The guards left on foot down the road. We cheered, we hugged our brothers, we cried for joy. The cooks broke into the pantries and freezers and made us a proper meal, trusting that more food would come in time to make up for the shortage they were creating. Which eventually it did. Troops from the AU arrived that night and declared us liberated. Nationalized, they said. Told us that now we were worker-owners of the mine, if we wanted to stay. If not, free to get on buses and ride away.

  Some of us left as soon as the buses showed. Most of us stayed. We figured we could leave later if we wanted. But being an owner of the mine sounded interesting. We wanted to know what that meant. Like sweat equity, some said. Sweat equity! Hell, we had blood equity in that mine.

  66

  You think your birth was hard— my mom exploded! Literally, yes, in that when she went supernova the heat of the detonation exceeded a hundred megakelvins and in that pressure three helium nuclei stripped of their two electrons were crushed together and there I was, as elegant as anything in the universe: carbon, the king of the elements, sweetly six-sided and tetravalent, able to bond with the atoms of my kind in several different ways, and to compound with other atoms in almost countless ways, being so friendly. So, boom! and there I was, flying across the universe. My particular neighborhood was your Milky Way, and I flew right into the knot of dust that was swirling down into Sol, where I could very easily have been roasted or crushed into something else entirely, but happily for me I fell into a swirl of dust that was coming together around ninety million miles from mighty Sol, and not too much time later I was part of a rocky planetesimal.

  Earth, you’re probably guessing, since we’re here now, but actually I first joined the Mars-sized rock coalescing at the Lagrange 5 point to Earth, a rock which now gets called Theia. So I was there for that big collision when Theia hit Gaia at speed, and they merged and tossed out a spray that quickly became the moon. A big bang! Although not compared to the real Big Bang, of course. And with that I found myself inside the hot new Earth, but in the mantle very near the surface, luckily for me or I wouldn’t be talking to you now. That was it for my catastrophic childhood and youth, everything since has been fairly sedate and what you might call adult.

  Well, but I forget my escape to the surface. That was pretty dramatic too. I came out in a volcanic eruption at a mid-ocean ridge between Pangea and I forget what land mass, they go away pretty fast. Hot lava sprayed into the sky, cooling almost instantly. A few million years exposed to the photon rain of sunlight softened me up, it was like getting a sunburn and I was part of the dead skin about to get sloughed off. Fine, I was ready, a million years is a long time, not to mention fifty million years; but the question was, which atoms would I join to effect my escape? I wanted to be eaten by a dinosaur, Jurassic era, and in those days it wasn’t that hard— photons banged me, my four exposed connector electrons were all quivering tetravalently, hoping for a pick-up, and as it so often happens, I got interest from two suitors at the same time! and wham bang, I had been stuck simultaneously to two oxygen atoms, and I was in a marriage very convenient indeed, as carbon dioxide.

  We made a good team. Life got busy. By flying low we kept getting picked up by plants. They would suck us in, and zoop, gurgle, I was part of a leaf, a twig, a tree trunk. I joined a proto-sequoia, that was a long date, then a fern, got eaten by an allosaur, pooped by same allosaur, yes I was a piece of shit then, and have been many times since, but bacteria love to eat shit, and quickly enough I ran into another pair of oxygen atoms and off again. But then, disaster: I was caught underwater in a muddy clutch of my fellow carbon atoms, and down we went back into the Earth, crushed there to graphite, in this case a seam of coal, where I spent many millions of years. Could even have been sucked down tectonically and crushed to diamond, and thus stuck forever in one small town of everyone-the-same, latticed in a veritable jail for all time, meaning really till the burning up of the Earth when the sun goes large, that would be my welcome release from that fate, but in this case I got lucky; my seam was mined by humans and burnt in a furnace, around the year 1634. Freedom! Back into the sky, and how I loved that. I like variety. So back to the sky, and hurray for organic chemistry, I was this and that, pangolin and rice stalk, mosquito and frog, frog poop and bacteria, then back to the sky yet again, hurrah!

  There’s that moment that comes when the water molecules drifting around in the air constellate on a tiny speck of dust and become a rain drop and begin their dive to Earth, and you can latch onto that, just get smacked by a downward droplet and join those happy people, your oxygen mates singing hi to the oxygen atoms in their hydrogen-twin marriages, trios are the best, everyone partying for the time of the dive. You lose the sense of gravity pulling on you when you fall at terminal velocity for your droplet, in fact sometimes you get hung up in a cloud or a mist or a fog and it’s just delightful, a delicious no-g sensation, I would suppose that it might be like what you would call orgasm. Bonding, sure, that can be good or bad, but floating in the sky in an orgasmic cloud, wow.

  But eventually the droplets are likely to coalesce until you are pelting down again. Snow is fun, sleet even more so. And then you crash onto Earth and things start again. Who would I join this time?

  Well, shit— not this time! Turns out that people in Canada had begun to deal with asbestos mine tailings by feeding the toxic rubble into the tailing pools that form in and next to mine pits, then adding some local cyanobacteria. These cyanobacteria grabbed me and then bonded with the asbestos dust, and together we clumped into hydromagnesite, a form of magnesium carbonate. These local kidnappers were all happy to have locked me and many of my mates down again, and the asbestos too, but when you’ve floated in fog, and body-surfed through an alimentary tract, sitting there in a rock is boring as hell. My only hope is that I’ll get ground up and used as a rock-climber’s hand powder, that’s about all magnesium carbonate is good for. Maybe I’ll end up in the powder pouch of some awesome cliff climber, that would be exciting, but for now I’m stuck. Oh well, time for a nap.

  67

  Taxes are interesting. They are one way governments guide a society and fund governmental activities, more the former than the latter. They are as old as civilization. An ancient manifestation of the power of the state. It’s possible that both debt and money were invented in the earliest cities, specifically in order to enable and regularize taxation. Both of them being forms of IOU.

  Progressive taxation refers to the idea that the more citizens own, the higher their rate of taxation. A regressive tax takes more, proportionally to individual wealth, from the poorest.

  Income taxes tax individual or corporate annual income, so these incomes are often manipulated by those earning them to appear lower than they really are. Various deferments and reinvestments and other methods slip money through tax loopholes, and tax havens are places where money, if it can be moved there before the annual accounting takes place, will not be taxed by the haven’s host, or will be taxed much less. So a progressive income tax can become quite ineffective as such. Vigilance in application is required.

  At certain moments in history excess personal wealth was frowned on, and the scale of progressive taxation grew quite steep. In the early 1950s, a time when many people felt that wealthy individuals had helped to cause and then profit from World War Two, the top tax brac
ket in the United States had earners paying in income tax 91 percent of all earnings over $400,000 (current value, four million dollars). This rate was approved by a Republican Congress and a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man who had commanded the Allied forces in the war, and had seen the death and destruction first hand, including the concentration camps. Later these top rates were lowered, over and over, until in the neoliberal period top rates were more like 20 or 30 percent. In those decades the tax loopholes and dodges and deferments and havens also grew hugely, so these already low percentages are actually inflated compared to the real amounts collected. Income taxes thus were made much less progressive; this was a feature of the neoliberal period, part of the larger campaign favoring private over public, rich over poor.

  Capital asset taxes, sometimes called Piketty taxes, tax the assessed value of whomever or whatever is being taxed. Usually these have been applied to corporations, but the same kind of tax can be applied to individuals. France taxed its corporations one percent of their assessed value per year, and if applied globally, the effects of such a tax could be very significant. These asset taxes too could be made progressive, such that the larger the corporation, or the assessed value of any asset, such as property, the higher the annual tax taken from it. If set steeply enough, a progressive tax of this sort would quickly cause big corporations to break up into smaller companies, to decrease their tax rate.

  Land taxes, sometimes called Georgist taxes, after an economist named Henry George, are taxes on property, meaning in this case specifically land itself as an asset. Again, these land taxes could be set progressively such that larger properties, or more valuable properties by way of location, or land not lived on by its owner, got taxed at a higher rate. As a great deal of profit and liquid assets more generally get turned into real estate as soon as possible, usually to own something tangible, the value of which is likely to rise over time, or at least not disappear entirely in a bubble’s burst, a land tax properly designed could again swiftly redistribute land ownership more widely, while quickly swelling government coffers in order to pay for public work, thus reducing economic inequality.

  A tax on burning fossil carbon, which could be called not a tax but rather paying the true cost, could be set progressively, or offset by feebates, to avoid harming the poorest who burn less carbon but also need to burn what they burn to live. A fossil carbon tax set high enough would create a strong incentive to quit burning it. It could be set quite high, and on a schedule to go even higher over time, which would increase the incentive to quit burning it. Tax rates on the largest uses could be made prohibitive, in the sense of blocking all chance of profits being made from any derivative effects of these burns.

  If all fiat money everywhere went digital and got recorded in blockchains, so that its location and transaction history could be traced and seen by all, then illegal tax dodges could be driven into non-existence by sanction, embargo, seizure, and erasure.

  Thus it will be seen that a fully considered and vigorous tax regime, using digital trackable currencies and instituted by all the nations on Earth by way of an international treaty brokered by the UN or the World Bank or some other international organization, could quickly stimulate rapid change in behavior and in wealth distribution. Some might even call it revolutionary change. And of course taxes are a legal instrument with a pedigree as long as civilization itself, its rates decided by legislatures and backed by the full force of the state, meaning ultimately the judiciary, police, and military. Taxes are legal, in other words, and accepted in principle and used by all modern societies. So, targeted changes to the tax laws— would that really be a revolution, if it were to happen?

  It would be interesting to try it and see.

  68

  Mary was flown back to Zurich in a military helicopter. They landed at Kloten and she was taken into town in a black van like the one she had left Zurich in. She sat next to Priska, watched their driver take the usual route into the city. But then where?

  Home, as it turned out. Hochstrasse, stopping curbside in front of her apartment building. “Here?” she asked.

  “Just to get some of your stuff,” Priska said. “They don’t think it’s a good idea for you to live here anymore, I’m sorry.”

  “Where, then?”

  “We have a new safe house up the hill,” Priska said. “We would like you to stay there. Once the situation becomes a little more clear, you can move back here. If that’s all right with you.”

  Mary didn’t reply. She wanted to be at home in her place, but also the idea made her nervous. Who was watching, if anyone? And why?

  She went in and packed a couple of big suitcases they provided. As she did she glanced around the place. She had lived here fourteen years. The Bonnard prints on the walls, the white kitchen; they looked like a museum recreation. That stage of her life was over, this was like walking around in a dream. Her legs were still throbbing. She needed to sleep. Shower and bed, please. But not here.

  They carried the suitcases for her, down the stairs and into the street, into the back of the van. Then off east, past the little trattoria she had sat in on so many nights, reading as she ate. Farther up the Zuriberg, into the stolid residential neighborhood on the side of the hill. These big old urban houses were worth millions of francs each, they gleamed with the finish of all that money, unremarkable boxes though they were. The van turned into the gated driveway of one of them, the driveway just a concrete pad the size of one vehicle, in the middle of a garden behind a tall white plastered wall topped with broken green glass shards, an unexpected touch of evil in all this bourgeois conformity. A gate closed off the driveway and made it a compound. Her new home. She stifled a groan, kept her eyes from rolling. She could still walk to work from here, if they would let her.

  Which they did. She could call and within minutes a little club of them would be gathered at the walk-in gate to escort her down the hill to Hochstrasse and the ministry offices, their blown-up building being rebuilt, the rest already re-occupied. She was surprised that the Swiss security people felt it was safe to go back, but she was assured that the area was now surveiled in ways that made it safer there than anywhere else. They couldn’t function from hiding, and it was important to show the world that Switzerland and the UN considered the ministry to be a crucial agency. Also that terrorism couldn’t change the momentum of history. They were going to defend that principle, and she was one of the living avatars of history in their time.

  Or just bait, Mary thought. Bait in their trap, perhaps. But then again her team was reassembled and back in their offices or jammed into replacement offices, doing their familiar work. Possibly the Swiss had caught the people who had attacked them and thus eliminated the danger. Their banks were said to be back online and functioning as before; whether there were structural changes included in the reboot wasn’t clear yet. So if those assailants had been caught or rendered inoperative somehow, possibly they were safe now. There couldn’t be that many people in the world who felt a toothless UN agency was worth attacking. Although the Paris Agreement had enemies, sure. It could be that the entire military apparatus of some vicious petro-state was now aimed right at her, as the symbol of all that was going wrong for them. It would be great to take some of those petro-states down, somehow. Jail their leaders or the like.

  But thinking of prison reminded her of Frank. Did she want to see him? Alas, she did. Possibly something in her wanted to make sure he was still locked up; maybe she was still afraid of the idea of him at large. But also, given that he was certainly going to be there, seeing him had to be more than just that. It felt like some kind of duty. Which feeling also had its interests. It was impossible to deny that he had caught her interest.

  Downtown on a tram like any ordinary person. This was all right with her minders, as long as one or more of them accompanied her. She glanced at the people in her tram car, wondering who they were. None of them looked likely. She recalled a line from a children’s book sh
e had loved, something like, If you want to claim to be our queen, while yet always invisible and unknown to us, you are welcome to the task. It was the same now; if you’re going to guard me but I don’t see you, fine, do it.

  Down at Hauptbahnhof she got off and walked the narrow downtown pedestrian streets to the Gefängnis. So characteristic of the Swiss to keep the old jail downtown. Why proclaim one part of the city to be more valuable than any other? The whole point of a city was to smoosh the whole society together and watch it function anyway, daily life some kind of flaneur’s bricolage. An agglomeration, as their urban designers called it, unembarrassed by the ugliness of the word in English.

  She checked into the prison without fuss and went to Frank’s dorm. He was in the living area there, reading a book. He looked up and his eyebrows rose.

  “I thought you were run out of town.”

  “I was. They let me come back.” She sat down on a couch across from him. “What are you reading?”

  He showed her the cover; an Inspector Maigret omnibus. In a dark world, she thought, a place of safety. Diagnose the evil. Everyone should have a Mrs. Maigret.

  “How’s it going?” she asked, wondering as always why she had come, what she could say.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “They let me out during the day. I work at the same place I was working before.”

  “The refugee center?”

  “Yeah. They’re expanding again. I’ve been there so long I’ve become a fount of institutional wisdom.”