Deep Time

But if this whole thing went bad because a junior High Guard officer had screwed up, he would skin that puppy alive when he got back to Earth.

If he gets back at all.

Koenig acknowledged one thing to himself, however. His speech underscored the vital need for advanced technology—and for the ongoing increase of that technology—to ensure the survival of Humankind. The whole problem between the USNA and the Earth Confederation, the root of the civil war now ending, was the issue of whether or not humans should accept Sh’daar limitations to technology and technological growth. But without nanotechnology—one of the proscribed technologies in the original Sh’daar Ultimatum—Washington, D.C. would have remained a swamp, with most of the old city submerged in a tidal estuary. Nanotech had grown new buildings. More important, it had grown the locks and tidal surge barriers downriver, at Mt. Victoria. It had repaired the sea barrier at the Verrazano Narrows, south of the Manhat Ruins, and the new Broad Sound Barrier off Boston.

In fact, it was proving to be more difficult to reintegrate the inhabitants of the Periphery into the USNA than it was reclaiming the submerged coastal cities. That was a social problem that they would be dealing with for a good many more decades yet to come. Natives of the Periphery—especially the Prims who continued to reject modern technology—distrusted the government that had abandoned them long ago, while many within the USNA continued to think of Prims as all but subhuman. But that was what he was hoping to change, starting with this speech. As much as he hated to admit it—and as much as he wished he was back in his command center—he was glad he had come here in person.

“Washington, D.C.,” he said, “was founded in 1791 as the capital of a new nation, a nation imbued with the then radical philosophy that there should be no distinction between social classes …”

Which, of course, had always itself been something of an illusion, he thought. At the time, women had been second-class citizens, people had owned slaves, and wealthy property owners maintained a kind of aristocracy of wealth. Today, the technical haves held the new wealth, and with it had forced the technological have-nots into occupying a lower social strata.

A law, an executive order, even a whole new city could not erase human nature.

And this old city had been buried in a lot of muck before, more than the rising Potomac ever could have dumped in its streets. The men who’d run this city and this country had succumbed more than once to power hunger, to corruption, to idiot fads and fallacies, to the socialistic abrogation of basic rights, to greed, to deception, to outright theft by means both legal and otherwise. Presidents had been disgraced, impeached, and even murdered; congressmen had ignored or betrayed the rule of law, justices had reinterpreted the Constitution. It was as dark and muddy a history as had ever swallowed this town.

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