In any case, Charlotte’s metahistory was very influential, providing for the explosively accelerating diaspora a kind of master narrative, by which they could orient themselves; and so she joined the small list of historians whose analyses had affected the flow of their own time, people like Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Gibbon, Chamfort, Carlyle, Emerson, Marx, Spengler— and on Mars before Charlotte, Michel Duval. People now ordinarily understood capitalism to have been the clash of feudalism and democracy, and the present to be the democratic age, the clash of capitalism and harmony. And they also understood that their own era could still become anything else as well— Charlotte was insistent that there was no such thing as historical determinism, but only people’s repeated efforts to enact their hopes; then the analyst’s retroactive recognition of such hopes as came true created an illusion of determinism. Anything could have happened; they could have fallen apart into general anarchy, they could have become a universal police state to “control” the crisis years; but as the great metanationals of Terra had in reality all mutated into Praxis-like worker-owned cooperatives, with people in control of their own work— democracy it was, for the moment. They had enacted that hope.

And now their democratic civilization was accomplishing something that the previous system could never have accomplished, which was simply survival in the hypermalthusian period. Now they could begin to see that fundamental shift in systems, in this twenty-second century they were enacting; they had shifted the balance, in order to survive the new conditions. In the cooperative democratic economy, everyone saw the stakes were high; everyone felt responsible for their collective fate; and everyone benefited from the frenetic burst of coordinated construction that was going on everywhere in the solar system.

This flowering civilization included not only the solar system beyond Mars, but the inner planets as well. In the flush of energy and confidence humanity was working back in to areas previously considered uninhabitable, and now Venus was attracting a crowd of new terraformers, who were following up on the gesture made by Sax Russell with the relocation of Mars’s great mirrors, and had elaborated a grand vision for the eventual inhabitation of that planet, the sister to Earth in so many ways.