  Requiring black hole evaporation to be quantum-mechanically coherent imposes
a universal, finite ``holographic bound'', conjectured to be due to fundamental
discreteness of quantized gravity, on the amount of information carried by any
physical system. This bound is applied to the information budget in the
standard slow-roll model of cosmic inflation. A simple estimate suggests that
when quantum gravity is included, fluctuations during inflation have a discrete
spectrum with a limited information content, only about 10^5 bits per mode,
fixed by the inverse scalar perturbation amplitude. This scarcity of
information may allow direct observation of quantum-gravity eigenmodes in the
anisotropy of cosmic background radiation.
