by Lee Correy
“I like your analogy,” The General remarked. “We’ve got to keep them at bay untit we’re too strong for them.”
“Then what, General?” I wanted to know. This was a critical question that had been nagging at me ever since I’d become exposed to the free-wheeling free market culture of the Commonwealth. “Once the Commonwealth becomes powerful, what restrains it? What keeps it from trying to conquer the world? What damps greed in this free-market state?”
The General replied simply. “A philosophy we all know and follow.”
“What can that do if I wanted to take over as absolute dictator and set out to conquer the world?”
The General sighed. “Sandy, your namesake Alexander the Great—who wasn’t so great after all—lived in a world of scarcity where there wasn’t quite enough to go around. In my lifetime, that’s changed. But people’s perceptions and thinking haven’t. We no longer live in a marginal survival system of shortages. There’s no reason for anyone to starve now…”
“A lot of people in the world are starving right now,” I remarked.
“They don’t have to. We didn’t.”
“You were different.”
“How?”
“Uh, well, I can’t explain it yet,” I admitted.
“What did I tell you at Karederu about acting like a slave?”
“But a starving free person is just like a starving slave.”
“To a free person, starvation is a temporary condition to be suffered until game can be killed or crops harvested,” The General stated, then went on, “We made ourselves free to make better lives for ourselves. But unlike most of the others, we knew we had to do it ourselves. No one was going to step in and save us. We bootstrapped ourselves over several centuries of slow and painful development by using our heads instead of our fists.”
“So what’s going to restrain the Commonwealth when we win?”
“You’ve heard of metalaw?” The General asked.
“I was exposed to it in case we ran into ETs.”
“But you weren’t encouraged to apply metalaw in contacts with intelligent terrestrial life?”
“That’s hard to do, General.”
“It is if you’re dealing with the classical peasant economy.”
“What’s that?”
“Didn’t they teach you any sociology and anthropology?”
“Only what we’d need as officers.”
“Pity, Sandy, the human race has evolved in a peasant economy where, if things were the best they could possibly be, everyone had a little of everything but no one had very much of anything.” General Vamori paused, then said with great emphasis, “Now it isn’t necessary to live that way! There’s plenty for everyone! There will always be plenty for everyone from now on! By using our minds and applying technology wisely, we’re using the Earth and, at last, the Solar System. What happens to greed when manna falls from the sky in such great abundance that it becomes senseless to hoard it?”
“Somebody will corner the market on manna and create an artificial shortage,” I told him.
“Not if there’s competition,” The General contended. “Universal abundance makes monopolies, cartels, price-fixing, and other non-competitive activities ineffective and too costly.”
“General, with all due respect,” I told him with some exasperation, “it can’t stop greed. That’s part of human nature we’ll never eliminate, just as we’ll never get rid of the desire to fight.”
“Sandy, you’re not looking at the systems properly. It’s bigger than you think. It’s not just the Earth with all its untapped potential, although that’s enough for some people. The system now includes the Moon, the planetoids, and the Galilean satellites.” The General looked thoughtful for a moment, started to say something, stopped, then finally remarked carefully, “Americans almost had it. Almost. They came agonizingly close. Your forefathers began to understand there was plenty for everyone. But they panicked when they just started to be successful. It was different. It was new. It had no track record, as they once said. It seemed too good to be true, so something had to be wrong.”
The old man relaxed in weightlessness, slipping into an open foetal position impossibleon Earth—legs bent, back slightly arched, limbs floating, all muscles totally unstressed.
“When everybody can have as much as they want without exhausting physical labor, greed goes away. Hoard if you want. Stash it away by the ton if you wish. Pile it up in the streets until you have no place left to put it. What good it is then?”
“It’s valuable when you’ve cornered the total supply,” I said.
“But you can’t! There’s always more and more and more!”
“Well, I wouldn’t give it away. Sooner or later, I’d be the only one supporting a lot of moochers.”
“What’s a moocher in a system where there’s plenty of everything?”
“Somebody that sponges off the system and doesn’t earn his keep. ‘There’s no free lunch.’ ”
“Very well, Sandy, suppose you have a system with plenty of everything for everyone but with the ‘no free lunch’ principle. What do you do with all you’ve managed to get hold of? You can use just so much of it. What are you going to do with the rest?”
“I’d swap it for something I don’t have, that I want or need, and that somebody else has.”
“That’s greed?”
“No, that’s trade.”
“That’s what the Commonwealth’s doing. It operates that way because we’re probably the first people in history to understand there’s no free lunch but so much of everything that it can’t be controlled by monopolies, cartels, politics, police, or state capitalism. And it can’t be taken away from armed traders without trading for something of equal value.”
“Seems to me you’re talking a super-sophisticated form of socialism,” I remarked. “If you’re basing the system on abundance and free trade, you won’t need money, for example…”
“Oh, but we do and will. It’s one of the greatest of all human inventions. With it, we can trade with or for something in the future that doesn’t exist yet. And since it’s only score-keeping, we can use the comm/info net to do it.”
I was out of my element, and I knew it. Money was something that was fairly easy to come by if I worked for it, and it was primarily useful for buying bread and butter. I didn’t try to fathom the “Free-and-Twenty-One” economics where the actual value of money slipped and slid around, depending upon buying power. My standard of exchange was breakfast.
Anywhere in the U.S., a good breakfast cost about ten dollars, and I used that yardstick to figure the value of currency when I was in other countries. I considered my primitive method of determining monetary value to be basic economics.
But I had to admit something to the old man. “General, you do a good job of explaining how the Commonwealth operates. It doesn’t make sense to me yet. In the meantime, I can live with it. But tell me something: How does the son of a merchant become a general and evolve into a social philosopher?”
It was a moment before The General answered. “I was once befriended by an anthropologist who came to the old land of Mitanni to dig. He got me interested in where the human race had been and where it could go if it wanted to. I took my doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania and started the Department of Anthropology at the University of Topawa.” The General explained. “When Colonel Joseph T. Chase set himself up as ‘maximum ruler’ and started looting the people who’d hired him to get rid of bandits, I happened to be in Topawa—it was just a village then. Chase decided he wanted power as well as immunity from the responsibility that must accompany power. I accidentally found myself in his path. The rest is history.”
“The history books say you’re a man with a mission who took command of the native military groups to save your people and your country from a dictator.”
“The history books lie,” The General replied gently. “They always do. But history happened in spite of the historians. I
stepped in to save myself and my family. Perhaps the historians will re-evaluate their conjectures in a century or so when our experiment is completed. We’re still in the midst of it, and the crucial stage is about to begin. And I’m incapacitated in Ell-Five! So you may have to fit temporarily into my ‘jack boots’ and lead in my stead, Sandy.”
I was totally taken aback by this. “General, I came to the Commonwealth as an aerospace pilot with military experience, not to assume a role in your government. I couldn’t be a leader for your people! What makes you think they’d follow me?”
“If you show you’re a leader, they’ll follow.”
“How do you know I’m not another Colonel Joseph T. Chase?”
“You aren’t. I knew him and I know you.”
“How long have you ‘known’ me, General? A couple of days? How could you really know me?”
Again, a long pause before The General said, “I’m not immortal. Someone must fill my place. That person mustn’t be exactly like me because conditions aren’t as they were fifty years ago. For a quarter of a century I’ve studied information that’s come in from a growing intelligence network. I’ve seen many promising young people come along only to destroy themselves with poor judgement and wishful thinking. I’ve kept tabs on you, Sandy, from the day you graduated from the Academy. But you aren’t unique because I’ve tracked your colleagues and others as well throughout the world. And you weren’t selected. Like me in Topawa fifty years ago, you’ve turned out to be in the right place at the right time. I really hope you’ll make the grade, Sandy, because you haven’t destroyed your potential yet.”
“Again I ask, how can you be sure I’m not another Chase?”
“I can’t. But I’m willing to risk it. We must always be ready to take calculated risks. Even if I were wrong about you, however, the Commonwealth now has the proper checks and balances to prevent another Chase incident. And Commonwealth people know they live in a universe of abundance.”
“But this should be a job for one of your family—Alichin, for example.”
The General shook his head. “They’re fighters but not tigers. Alichin is a good planner, a rebellious frontiersman, a businessman, a merchant, and a trader. He knows this and of my feeling toward you.”
“General, you’re laying a hell of a big burden on me. I’m not sure I’ll accept it.”
The old man tried to reach out to touch me, but the septic membrane halted his hand. He smiled broadly. “Sandy, in spite of my age, I’m likely to be around for another twenty years. Doctor Tsaya here tells me in so many words that I’m too mean to die. Be that as it may, you’re not faced with the possibility immediately. There’s no vacuum that will draw you in quickly. It just seems that way because the leadership vacuum apparently produced by the Karederu fire is only partial and temporary until I heal. It gives you an opportunity as my deputy to learn what’s going on.” He smiled and withdrew his hand. “It sounds like a big responsibility, but for a long time I may use you only as a go-fer, Sandy.”
I hoped he was right.
Chapter 8
The Weapon of the Commonwealth
“The General enjoyed your visit,” Doctor Tsaya Stoak said as we left the Haeberle Clinic.
“I did, too,” I admitted. We cycled through the Clinic’s hatch into the main gallery of L-5.
“But he scares me.”
“Don’t be over-awed by General Vamori. He’s just a human being.”
Closing the hatch behind us, I replied, “To me there’s no such thing as ‘just a human being.’ ”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Tsaya tried to explain. “A lot of people in the Commonwealth think he’s a god. It’s a hold-over from the past that’s not easy to get out of people’s minds.”
“He isn’t a god to me,” I told her as we moved down the corridor. “The General’s the Grand Old Man of the Commonwealth, the father image.”
“Of course. It’s going to be a long time before we shed the need for a father image, if we ever do. It’s such a deep part of the human psyche that medical and mental lore is full of the symbolism of it.”
We were moving along the gallery toward the League of Free Traders’ Lounge.
“Hungry?” I asked.
“Yes, but not for a full meal. Just a snack,” she replied and went on to explain, “I have to watch my weight. I don’t want to end up like those fat, jolly old mama types in the Topawa marketplace.”
I gave Tsaya an admiring once-over. Gone were the loose cotton pull-overs and tunics worn in the tropical Commonwealth. Tsaya wore a white body stocking with slippers on her feet plus a white tailored tunic. Her long hair was held above her head in a net.
“I can’t picture you as a fat old mama,” I remarked with admiration. “You know too much about biotechnology to let that happen. At any rate, you’re certainly in a position to take advantage of the biocosmetic centers in Europe and America.”
“I don’t intend to have to,” she said as we sat at a table. She punched-up fruit cocktailand electrolyte-balanced hot chai. Out of old habit, I ordered the usual duty drink of an Aerospace Force officer: milk. She went on, “But I’ll begin to exhibit the Rensch Snydrome if I’m not careful.”
“Another medical term?” I asked her.
“You’re a big man from a cold climate,” she observed.
“Santa Barbara wasn’t exactly cold, but you’re right. My ancestors came from jolly olde England.”
“You owe more to your English ancestors than to Santa Barbara’s climate. You could survive where the temperature drops below five degrees Celsius because you store insulating fat everywhere on your body,” she pointed out. She was right. I was starting to get a little heavy from lack of exercise. She went on, “My ancestors came from the Toak Plains near Manitu, from the Arabian penninsula, and from the Iranian desert. Hot places, all of them. For me, extra calories turn into fatty tissue located where it interferes least with body movement and cooling—my buttocks and breasts. I’m genetically equipped to survive in a climate where the temperature exceeds twenty-eight Celsius.”
“I thought Commonwealth people were well hybridized by now.”
Tsaya shook her head. “Three to five generations aren’t enough. It may take ten. It took far longer than that in America because you had social barriers. We don’t. But on the other hand we don’t know what we’re hybridizing for.”
“Pardon?”
“Our future and our frontier is in space. What kind of human being is optimal for that? Today the Japanese are good at living in cramped tin cans in space. They’re adaptable and have a social system that’s eminently suited to it.”
“But cramped tin cans won’t last,” I argued. “We’re creating environments to our liking now. Homo spatial ought to be non-specialized, able to function without life support gadgetry anywhere there’s oxygen partial pressure from a hundred to five-hundred millibars, temperature from zero to fifty Celsius, and gravity from three gees down to weightlessness.”
Our orders came up on the call board; I picked them up, parted with food chits, and returned to the table. Tsaya had thought about what I’d said because she told me as I tucked my legs under the table, “I can’t argue that from the physiological standpoint. Almost any normal human being in good health can meet those criteria. But how about the intersocial aspects?”
“As you pointed out, the Japanese do well out here.”
She squeezed chai out of the tube and smiled. I liked her smile. “But we’re going to do better.”
“How?”
“Where’s your iklawa?” she asked with sudden coolness.
“Is that the word for the daggers you all wear?”
“That’s right.”
“Strange word.”
“It comes from the sound of the blade being pulled from the body of an enemy.” Tsaya lowered her right hand to her waist. The knife was in plain sight, but she was wearing it so naturally that I hadn’t noticed it. “Arm yourself, citizen. Or are
you ashamed of living?”
“Uh, sorry,” I apologized. “I didn’t think I’d be permitted to wear a weapon in a space facility.”
“Others expect us to be armed. It’s the mark of a citizen of the Commonwealth.” She put both hands on the table and went on in a pleasant voice, “Do you have an iklawa, or would you like to borrow one of mine?”
“Can I, uh, borrow one, Tsaya?”
“Of course. I’ve noticed you unarmed and thought you might need the loan of one.” She produced another small ornamental knife and its scabbard from under the flap of her body tunic and handed it to me. “I drew this at Karederu. Consider it a gift of welcome. You’re a citizen of the Commonwealth. You must bear arms openly.”
“I’ll do that, and thank you very much, Tsaya. But what does this have to do with hybridization and the social aspects of space living?” I wanted to know.
“Everything. The Japanese are polite because of centuries of cultural training. You’re not. I’m not. We’re polite to one another now because there’s no conflict between us; we wouldn’t be polite if one of us had something the other wanted and thought it could be taken by force without suffering any immediate physical consequences. When you’re openly armed and apparently capable of defending yourself, you’ll be politely treated with good manners.”
“Uh, okay, maybe, but that could lead to a lot of violence. If you can draw an iklawa and slip it into anybody you don’t like, it seems to me it encourages murder.”
“Quite the contrary. There have been no murders in the Japanese or Commonwealth space facilities. Yes, there’ve been deaths in our module, but they were outlanders who didn’t believe our willingness to protect ourselves. Elsewhere in space, there’ve been the usual per capita ratio of fights, injuries, and murders.”
“So you think we’re going to be the best space people because of both hybridization and personal weaponry?”
“It worked very well in your country before it got messed up,” Tsaya reminded me.
“Messed up? The General said something like that, too!”
“We learned a lot from Americans. They were a dynamic, forceful, successful people. They made mistakes and we’re not going to make the same ones. And it did get messed up. Look at what happened to you, Sandy.”