“The swivel bearings arrived, then?”
“Finally—yesterday morning.”
“What about the rewiring job that Quane was doing?”
“He moved on. I think somebody in Hybrid is after him.”
“Hm . . . We need to find a replacement, then,” Keene said.
“Mariel’s working on it,” Shayle told him.
As with any society that had progressed beyond primitive, Kronia needed ways of coordinating effort and unifying its policies in order to function. Its complex technologies and public services could no more have been sustained by unorganized individuals following their own inclinations than an army could hope to succeed as an unled mass with no plan or strategy. But how could such organization come about without the monetary incentives that had built Earth’s corporate hierarchies, or authority structures of the kind that had shaped its military commands and academic tradition? As with so much else of Kronian social dynamics, the solution hadn’t been designed or imposed, but had emerged as a consequence of the unique value system.
Keene had begun his professional life in Kronia by heading a small research team working to combine spacecraft drive nucleonics with MHD power generation. He headed it because others had decided they had something worthwhile to learn from him and followed. Shayle was a fusion specialist who had become his second. But the main challenge for him had been not so much in the work itself, but in understanding how a functioning research environment could come together for such work to take place in to begin with.
Pang-Yarbat ran the larger project that Keene had later joined, bringing his group of people with him. But neither Pang-Yarbat nor Keene received monetary funding to hire the people and pay for the services they needed to get the work done. How any kind of cohesion or loyalty could be sustained in such a situation had been one of the first mysteries Keene had faced on joining the Kronian workplace.
The way to be valued in such a system was by doing work that was worthwhile and demanding. But that worked two ways. What mattered was not so much what you might imagine your own level of excellence to be, as the standing and reputation of the people who accepted you as a colleague to work with. Thus, a hierarchy of recognition took shape, reflecting the quality accorded to one’s work. The most prestigious teams set the toughest standards, and in the self-reinforcing system that resulted, they attracted the most capable contenders. Making top grade was like being awarded a Fortune 500 directorship or entry to one of the old Ivy League universities—except that it couldn’t be bought with money or connections. There was only one way to get accepted: by being damn good.
It had taken Keene awhile to realize fully what a tribute it had been when Pang-Yarbat invited him and his team to join the larger project. It meant that he and those who had attached themselves to him became a section within Pang-Yarbat’s group, with a corresponding elevation of status that attracted more talent. The section now consisted of eight regulars in addition to Keene himself. Of these, five were committed to working there exclusively—on the equivalent of a contract. The remaining three worked for Keene part of the time but were also associated with other projects, sometimes competing ones, and not yet decided as to which way they wanted to go. Finally, there were recently qualified students or technicians who moved around until they found a niche that stimulated them sufficiently to want to attach to.
Secrecy was impossible in such circumstances, and clashes of interest inevitable, which would have made such a system unthinkable on Earth. But Kronians valued the flow of information more highly than ownership, on the grounds that it would be more likely to find its way to whoever would make the best use of it. As with material things, proprietary information counted for little on Kronia. Nobody cared about, or was too impressed by, how much a person had; what mattered was what they could do.
* * *
The tube access point that Keene and Shayle alighted at was in the subsurface part of Essen’s central area. They emerged on one side of a concourse where a traffic gallery carrying open-seat electric cars, and pedestrian terraces at various levels came together in a complex geometry that confused newcomers. A children’s group wearing an assortment of traditional costumes from Earth was putting on some kind of performance in front of a grotto of shrubs and ferns, where water cascaded down too slowly over rocky ledges to a pond. Around and above were offices and other workplaces, eateries and stores—or at least, the places that came closest to serving the same purpose. For with no money system, people just took what they needed. Terrans had known about Kronian “commerce,” of course, but even after seeing it for himself, Keene had remained baffled for a long time as to how it could work. It went against everything he had grown up understanding as making sense. If there was no restriction on what somebody could take, what was to prevent everyone from wanting everything? And given that, how could any system of production keep up?—never mind one as limited in kind and capacity as Kronia’s.