"What's the second reason?" Jesse asked.
"The second reason is that there's no reason to. Even if we did figure out how to build one of these things, we couldn't afford to build it." Harry leaned back. "Just before I was a teacher, I worked for General Electric's civil engineering department. We were working on the SubAtlantic rail line at the time, and one of my jobs was to go through old projects and project proposals to see if any of the technology or practices had application to the SubAtlantic project. Sort of a hail-Mary attempt to see if we could do anything to bring down costs."
"General Electric bankrupted itself on that, didn't they?" I asked.
"Now you know why they wanted to bring down costs," Harry said. "And why I became a teacher. General Electric couldn't afford me, or much of anyone else, right after that. Anyway, I'm going through old proposals and reports and I get into some classified stuff, and one of the reports is for a beanstalk. General Electric had been hired by the U.S. Government for a third-party feasibility study on building a beanstalk in the Western Hemisphere; they wanted to clear out a hole in the Amazon the size of Delaware and stick it right on the equator.
"General Electric told them to forget it. The proposal said that even assuming some major technological breakthroughs—most of which still haven't happened, and none of which approach the technology that has to be involved with this beanstalk—the budget for the beanstalk would be three times the annual gross national product of the United States economy. That's assuming that the project did not run over budget, which of course it almost certainly would have. Now, this was twenty years ago, and the report I saw was a decade old even then. But I don't expect that the costs have gone down very much since then. So no new beanstalks—there are cheaper ways of getting people and material into orbit. Much cheaper."
Harry leaned forward again. "Which leads to two obvious questions: How did the Colonial Union manage to create this technological monstrosity, and why did they bother with it at all?"
"Well, obviously, the Colonial Union is more technologically advanced than we are here on Earth," Jesse said.
"Obviously," Harry said. "But why? Colonists are human, after all. Not only that, but since the colonies specifically recruit from impoverished countries with population problems, colonists tend to be poorly educated. Once they get to their new homes, you have to assume they're spending more time staying alive than they are thinking up creative ways to build beanstalks. And the primary technology that allowed interstellar colonization is the skip drive, which was developed right here on Earth, and which has been substantially unimproved for more than a century. So on the face of it, there's no reason why the colonists should be any more technologically advanced than we are."
Something suddenly clicked in my head. "Unless they cheat," I said.
Harry grinned. "Exactly. That's what I think, too."
Jesse looked at me, and then Harry. "I'm not following you two," she said.
"They cheat," I said. "Look, on Earth, we're bottled up. We only learn from ourselves—we make discoveries and refine technology all the time, but it's slow, because we do all the work ourselves. But up there—"
"Up there humans meet other intelligent species," Harry said. "Some of which almost certainly have technology more advanced than ours. We either take it in trade or reverse engineer it and find out how it works. It's much easier to figure out how something works when you've got something to work from than it is to figure it out on your own."
"That's what makes it cheating," I said. "The CU is reading off someone else's notes."
"Well, why doesn't the Colonial Union share what it's discovered with us?" Jesse asked. "What's the point of keeping it to themselves?"
"Maybe they think that what we don't know can't hurt us," I said.
"Or it's something else entirely," Harry said, and waved toward the window, where the beanstalk cables slid by. "This beanstalk isn't here because it's the easiest way to get people to Colonial Station, you know. It's here because it's one of the most difficult—in fact, the most expensive, most technologically complex and most politically intimidating way to do it. Its very presence is a reminder that the CU is literally light-years ahead of anything humans can do here."