Outies

by Pournelle, J. R.

  Even the Elder was wide-eyed. There was no where else to look. There was nothing else to see. Down through the ranks of demons strode seven stately figures, twin arms folded, gripping arms extended, fur a blinding white. One topped the others by a head and shoulders. Except that none of them had shoulders. Only when they had reached the stage did the alien cheer and Himmist Hymn subside.

  Laurel stepped forward, eyes bright. “It is my privilege to introduce The Excellency Sargon the Hand, Procurator of Swenson’s Valley, Protector of Mesolimeris, Defender of Ar, and the Masters of the Six Cities, with whom all of The Barrens are allied.”

  There was silence, save for the wind, whipping through the various flags of ecumenical fabric. The Elder was started from shocked reverie by sharp, echoing clapping that arose from a pair of hands directly by his side. He turned and stared, heart sinking, as he watched Ollie Azhad rise and step away. Fuse lit, the applause whipped down the rows; across the aisles, following the TCM lines, and the thought finally came: Good Lord. I’ve lost them. TCM Security has defected to their side. He looked out across the amphitheatre. He had no MPs. He had no TCM Zonies. He had no Temple. He was just one among patriarchs. He looked again. And matriarchs. He looked again. And—them.

  The Bonneville Counselor spoke for the final time. “The First Constitutional Convention of New Utah is convened. Will official delegates please join us inside.”

  Sargon hadn’t the patience for this. It fell to Enheduanna. Who hadn’t the patience, either, but an order was an order. Humans were infuriating. They argued about what ought to be, instead of negotiating what was. Now the Elder was shouting something.

  “Facts on the ground? I’ll give you facts on the ground. TCM tithe collection is this planet’s government. There’s no other institution that governs both Saint George and Bonneville.”

  “Governs? More like poaches. Strips us all of tithe to pour into Maxroy’s Purchase and that misbegotten Temple!”

  “And well-placed, too! Without the Maxroy’s Purchase True Church—”

  “Without the MPs we’d be dealing with two thousand fewer common thugs!”

  This last outburst came from the Mayor herself, much to the shock of the Elder. He was genuinely hurt. “Madam, do not forget the sacrifices the True Church has made to make this planet habitable. Selenium supplements. Medical supplies—“

  “Which we wouldn’t need if you hadn’t leached the topsoil.” Now the Himmists were back in the fray.

  The babble was cut short by Enheduanna. “We will repair this. We will restore ar.”

  The Elder bridled; refused to face the ape. “I fail to see why this—creature—has a place at this table. We are making decisions regarding accession to the Empire of Man.”

  The Bonneville Counselor spoke up. “Well, I can’t say we’re thrilled about it either, but, you know—” she looked at Enheduanna— “there’s rather an army of ‘facts on the ground.’ And that army’s not yours.”

  For hours, the arguments rolled ‘round in circles. Asach, observer, sat in the corner, doodling the same words, over and over. Then added curlicues, baubles, leaves; the words peered out of gewgaw forests. Coffee. Pie. People. Different. Fixing. They broke; returned; broke; returned; made no progress backward; made no progress forward.

  The Elder wanted his True Church. Bonneville wanted—Bonneville. Eclectic, anarchistic, metropolitans-in-the-desert that they were. The Barrens wanted manna. The Mesolimerans wanted to be left the hell alone. Who was left to tip the scale? Asach was out of options.

  At the next break, Colchis Barthes, with quiet aplomb, approached Jeri LaGrange, still assigned to protect the chief Saint George dignitary of the no-longer-one True Church. They chatted softly and briefly. At the break after that, he stepped over to Ollie Azhad; asked quietly: “might I have a word?” Next came the Saint George mayor. The University president. Like Lillith at a grand soiree, Colchis Barthes greased the herd.

  The next morning, as conference broke for Sabbath prayers, the Mayors climbed aboard one of the gossamer birds.

  It was, all-in-all, an earthy delegation. Farmer John peered out from beneath his grandiose ear. The Lads, shorn of weaponry and excess hair, certainly cleaned up good. The President of the Saint George Grange was new upon the scene. Collie Orcutt was bracketed by Laurel and his younger self, a sinewy Professor of Agronomics from Zion University. They’d worked all night. Their staffs had worked all night. In the case of the university, a bunch of students had worked all night. The delegates filed in, bleary-eyed themselves, and were met with nothing less than a model world.

  It was three dimensional. It spun and swirled. By inserting hands inside, it could virtually stretch; by squashing it outside, it could be shrunk; by bracketing points, a section could expand to fill the whole wall. In depth; in detail; in beautiful illustration, they explained and showed what it took to actually feed all eight cities on their world.

  The Mesolimeran cities were dazzling. They sparkled topaz, ringed with aquamarine fields. Beauty aside, the statistics were sobering. Mesolimeran farming was at least six times as productive as even the best of Saint George farmland. Its primary philosophy was intensive, where Saint George’s had always been extensive. Direct to the heart, if allowed to extend their methods to The Barrens—which the gatherings would wholeheartedly encourage—they could produce sufficient selenium supplementation to serve the entire human population of New Utah within a year.

  Which meant the True Church could use its legitimate revenue to rebuild.

  As could Bonneville.

  The Elder was intrigued, but suspicious, still. “And what do they want in return?”

  Enheduanna answered, personally, with one word. “Citizenship.”

  The Elder looked blank.

  “We want the same rights as humans.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “And we want Sargon appointed Defender of Ar for all of New Utah.” Anticipating the next objection, Enheduanna interjected: “We care nothing for your Church.”

  The Mayor of Saint George spoke up. “Ladies and Gentlemen, on behalf of the Mayors of the Eight Cities,” she paused a moment for that number to sink in, “I’d like to circulate a draft Constitution.”

  17

  Intellectual Property

  What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me— nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

  —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, scene 2

  Saint George, New Utah

  “I don’t understand. Why can’t we just use the Lynx?” The voice was gruff; querulous.

  There were six groups clumped around Lillith Van Zandt’s conference table, with one from each more-or-less shoved to the fore. What had been her conference table, now moved to another room. It was early. Frost still lay on the valley, spread far below.

  At the head was Sargon himself, with old Lagash, Farmer John, a Doctor, the senior Keeper of the Storehouses, and a knot of Miners arrayed behind him. Two warriors stood as Sergeants-at-Arms.

  To Sargon’s right was a cluster of religious heads representing the assorted patriarchs, elders, bishops, presbyters, pastors, imams, and rabbis of the various Christian, Muslim, and Jewish denominations. Only Laurel Courter and the New Utah True Church Elder were pushed up to the table. Next to them was seated the Chair of the Board of Physiology of the New Utah College of Nurses, Physicians, and Allied Healing Arts.

  To Sargon’s left sat Asach, and beyond Asach was a knot of civil servants, including the Mayors of Saint George and Bonneville, departmental chiefs of the utility and transportation authorities, and Michael Van Zandt, along with Zia and a senior TCM warehouse accountant. They were more-or-less clumped behind Aloysius Geery, chair of Zion University’s College of Technical
Science, Engineering, and Urban Planning, along with the senior research librarian and the college’s lone astrophysicist, a mostly self-taught junior Fellow. Oblivious to any potential issues of protocol or propriety, the engineering operations chiefs of OLaM, SunRail, SunFish, DAZ-E, FLIVRBahn, and the Saint George spaceport were sprawled in various elbow-leaning, leg-bouncing attitudes in the conference chairs, messing with the on-table graphics and passing e-notes back-and-forth to their field staffs, even as they argued.

  At the foot of the table were the Imperial Observers, in the persons of HG, Colchis Barthes, and the ITA representative. Barthes smiled inwardly. HG was clearly annoyed. He’d only just returned, and still suffered from the delusion that Asach was his personal aide-de-camp. That Asach was not fulfilling that role was annoying enough, but Asach’s privileged seat at the table next to Sargon’s gripping hand was likely to turn HG apoplectic before the meeting was over. It was the Librarian’s self-appointed private responsibility to remind HG that he was there in an official capacity, and keep him sitting on his hands.

  The spaceport ops officer repeated the question. “The Lynx? Why can’t we just use that?”

  “Because it’s not ours. It’s FairServ’s. We didn’t design it. We didn’t develop it. We didn’t build it. It’s not based on indigenous New Utah technology.”

  “Well, an ITA landing craft. Or Nauvoo Vision. That’s what they came in on, right?” with a hike of the thumb in HG’s direction.

  “Same logic.”

  “OK, a True Church shuttle, if we have to!”

  “And there’s the rub, again. It’s theirs. Maxroy’s Purchase’s. That makes us an MP colony, not an independent Classified world. Haven’t you been listening? You must grasp this! The Empire of Man will not recognize space flight unless we develop it ourselves. We can’t just buy it.”

  “This is ridiculous. We may not be industrial giants, but we are a fully developed world! We’ve masses of indigenous technology. Masses of indigenous aircraft.”

  “Like?”

  “FLIVRs, strictly speaking. SunFish hoppers.”

  “I won’t comment on FLIVRs. And the SunFish is a powered glider.”

  “A solar-powered glider, capable of round-the world hops.”

  “And used, I might add, for planetary tax-collection.”

  “By you lot of the TCM, while you were still under MP control, which is not really the precedent we want to reinforce, eh?

  “But not, sadly, for orbital flight. It’s an air-breather. No air, no flight. Or should I say, in air, no spaceflight.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Mining flingers, then. Pushed to the max, they deliver payload on an extra-atmospheric ballistic trajectory. You can’t claim we bought those!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t bray about ‘em too loudly. Any child with a ruler, six magnets, and a handful of ball bearings can make a coil gun.”

  “Not one that uses solar power to shove a ton of payload over mountain ranges! Go try it yourself, you people mover.”

  “Again, sub-orbital. And anyway, incapable of carrying a living passenger, rock pusher.”

  “But we had no reason to invest in independent spacecraft development, let alone launch capacity! We could have done. For God’s sake, after the First Empire collapsed, Aldrich Saxe sketched designs for a manned, orbital Flinger in 2699. The story is not apocryphal. He was half-drunk one night, and did it on a bet, on the back of a cocktail napkin, within twenty minutes! I’ve seen it! But there was no point in developing it, because there’s nothing to mine up there! We’ve one rocky scrap of an asteroid moon, and that’s it. We’re a small place. We have small, dispersed settlements. We built to appropriate scale. Space vehicles sufficient to our needs were already here! They did not need re-inventing. We concentrated on developing efficient solar technology that we could use. You might as well say that Sparta isn’t an independent developer!”

  “But they could be. They have the infrastructure. They have the University. They have the Library. The knowledge is already there.”

  “The knowledge was already here!”

  “But we can’t prove that.”

  “We can’t prove that, because Lillith Van Zandt”—murderous glare toward Michael— “burned down the Scriptorium!”

  “In which case, the knowledge was lost. The space technology available to New Utah is built, maintained, and launched from offworld, specifically from Maxroy’s Purchase.”

  “That’s insane. You think that bunch of god-bothering, seed-spitting Snow Ghost hunters pulled a spaceport out of their agricultural communes and genealogy charts? They bought the whole damned thing, kit and caboodle. And a beat-up pile of space junk it is to boot, from what I’ve heard.”

  “That’s different.” HG had that adolescent trump-card look about him again.

  “Why?!”

  Barthes cut him off before he could blurt out something childish, like ‘because I said so.’ “Because on Maxroy’s Purchase the Navy was presented with a done deal. The MP economy—trade system, technology exchange, the whole lot— was already integrated with New Caledonia. The genie was already out of the bottle.”

  “Well, so was ours, until the embargo. The economy, I mean.”

  “Should have joined up when you had the chance.” There was no end to HG’s smugness.

  “What chance was that? As a Maxroy’s Purchase colony? You’ve seen enough by now to know that would have meant civil war. We did our best to avoid that, and bloody well did, in spite of Lillith Van Zandt’s best efforts.”

  “And so, we are back to no planetary government.”

  “Well then how the hell did we get labeled as a bunch of dangerous, piratical, space-faring Outies if we’re so backward and primitive that we can’t even be Classified?”

  “That’s rather the point, isn’t it? The bottom line is: when the Navy pops through that door, if they don’t see developed, orbital technology, they become rather determined to keep things that way. Lest you become a threat to the Empire.”

  Sargon grew increasingly bored with this. He Spoke.

  Asach thought long and hard, then interpreted. Not translated—there was no simple string of literal words that could convey the concepts involved—but interpreted, as best possible.

  “There is planetary government now. Anyone who disagrees may leave.” Asach paused briefly. No-one stirred. Asach posed the question on Sargon’s behalf. “If there is no spaceflight, what becomes of the ar? The land? What becomes of the productivity of the land?”

  “You lose control of it.”

  “This we will never allow.”

  HG exercised usual tact. “You’ll ‘allow’ it, or the Navy will fry the planet.”

  Sargon was horrified. “They would do this? These Imperials? They would destroy ar?”

  Asach answered, softly, for the benefit of the room, “They would destroy everything that lives.” That stopped the chatter, even among the engineers.

  Sargon swept three hands backward impatiently. “I do not mean the living. I mean the ar. The potential. The potential of the land to produce life.”

  Now Barthes answered. “If they thought the threat great enough, they would turn the soil to glass.”

  Sargon’s response was involuntary. Although it involved no movement, every being in the room felt a tremor; a temblor; a wrenching, eerie wrongness in the bones, not unlike the feeling during a jump. It was the feeling that accompanies a near-strike of lightning, or rolling thunder, or the eerie noises that echo through deep caves. All shivered, or squinted their eyes, dimly aware that their bodies and brains had heard something that their ears had not.

  Then Sargon Spoke. Again, Asach interpreted.

  “Then you will cease arguing. You will make a solution. You will begin the work with all due haste.”

  The humans looked about, confused by this. Now, the Miners began earnest conversation among themselves. Enheduanna barked orders. Farmer John had already motioned to a Runner before Asach explained.
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  “The Protector has just placed the entire means of this planet at your disposal. He has authorized you to procure whatever, or whomever, you need to accomplish this task. Unto death, if necessary—which I should explain is something that The Protector does not entertain lightly.”

  “Just like that? Wave our hands and, voila, a solution?“

  “Consider it a vote of confidence. For him, the decision is simple. The ar of this planet is threatened, and Sargon is the defender of the ar. Anything you can imagine—wealth, power, life, sanctity, even just plain getting laid—is summed up in that word. Without ar, nothing else matters. Nothing else exists.”

  “Well, rationally speaking, there could of course be some level of compensation, not to mention personal preservation, that would—” The ITA representative stopped abruptly as the eldritch feeling passed through everyone again.

  “Excellency, I believe The Protector feels that this is not a good time for philosophical discussion.”

  “Right,” said Geery. “Down to business. What are the rules. What’s the minimum we can get away with?”

  “Ah, there’s the rub. We aren’t allowed to read the rules. We have to get there on our own.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Regarding the minimum necessary, there is a precedent that we could invoke.”

  Heads and bodies swiveled. The astrophysicist had finally weighed in.

  “Prince Samual’s World. About thirty years ago. Just after Maxroy’s Purchase joined the Empire. Around the time of first contact with the Mote. Maybe just before that. Twenty years before the first Jackson delegation arrived, anyway.”

  “Care to explain, for the benefit of those of us who weren’t exactly tuned in at the time?”

  The astrophysicist sighed. “I’m afraid I don’t really know the details. Before my time. I was just a kid. I just remember people talking about it—how this industrial world achieved space flight before they had even developed aircraft. ”